


Pseudesthesia

by universe_c



Series: Pseudesthesia [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Brainships, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bickering, Body Horror, Established Relationship, Feels, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, That's Not How The Force Works, awful people being tender, awful people in awful situations, bickering over feels, but also being awful, eventually, frankly really gross amounts of tenderness, questionable force discourse, that's not how kyber crystals work probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-12 05:44:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7087600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/universe_c/pseuds/universe_c
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snoke presents Kylo Ren with a gift before sending him to complete his training:  his former rival and secret hate-friend with benefits, retrofitted as his new shipboard AI.  </p>
<p>This is a punishment for them both, and a test. </p>
<p>They proceed to fail it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please mind the tags! This fic contains graphically detailed body horror and suicidal ideation.
> 
> This has NOT been beta'd. Any and all gaffs, canonical inaccuracies, comma faults etc are purely my own fault. 
> 
> Many, many thanks to the incomparable [youdidnotseeme](http://youdidnotseeme.tumblr.com/) for constant cheerleading and support and for drawing me this heart-stabby picture of [Hux in his tube](http://youdidnotseeme.tumblr.com/post/147328012221/ok-so-universe-c-wrote-this-amazing-story-called). (Warning: graphic body horror)
> 
> ALSO, I am humbled to present this [beautiful rendition of tube!Hux](http://neuroestatica.tumblr.com/post/149048093204/1-amputation-kylux-33-days-of-guro-so-in) by [neuroestatica](http://neuroestatica.tumblr.com/tagged/mio). This style is going to murder me with feels. (Warning: graphic body horror, Ren tragedyface)
> 
> Many thanks also to everyone who's left comments! I'm not very good at replying (sorry), but I really appreciate how thoughtful and supportive you all are!

Hux dreams the same dream over and over. He is swimming up out of a narrow well, an ocean, a swift flowing river. He’s flailing for the surface in panic. Above the water, the scorching light will burn him, but he has no choice. He’s drowning. Just before he can surface Kylo Ren’s hands push him back down.

He realizes this is a dream. He has the presence of mind to be annoyed at the obvious metaphor, even as he kicks against the weight of his boots and uniform. When Ren’s hands come he grabs for them, holds them, drags with all his strength. He’s not sure if he’s trying to pull himself up or pull Ren under.

For a moment he thinks he’s woken up, finally. But he’s still drowning, tangled and caught in some kind of wire, unable to move his limbs. He hurts.

The pain cuts out all at once and with its absence comes rage. Hux has known much rage in the past few years, dealing with the annoyances and setbacks of his co-command with Kylo Ren. Hux’s rage is a white, snow-blind thing, paralyzing until it’s beaten down and subsumed in his sense of purpose. This rage is a simmering, black-red scar, the crater of an impact so massive it’s destabilized an entire planet. It is a rage waiting for any provocation to erupt. He knows it.

**_REN. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?_ **

**_You were screaming. I stopped you._ **

Hux gets the sense that he’s inconveniencing Ren enormously at the moment. Ah, there is his own, familiar rage.

**_GET OUT OF MY HEAD._ **

Ren fights as Hux tries to shove him out, then all at once lets him go.

Hux opens his eyes. He really is underwater. There’s a tube up his nose, down his throat, it hurts. He’s drowning anyway, can’t seem to move, a line of pain burns across his chest and arms just above his elbows and he remembers.

He died.

The pain cuts out again, Ren’s rage closing back around him like a trap. Hux is grateful and ashamed of it. Ren can tell; it makes him angrier.

_Where are we? Is that a bacta tank?_

In reply, Ren opens his eyes. His hand is pressed against a transparisteel tube. Inside it, Hux sees himself.

Ren closes his eyes again _._

**_Stop screaming_ ** _. I must complete my training. You are making it impossible._

**_FUCK YOUR TRAINING. WHAT DID THEY DO TO ME? WHY?_ **

Hux imagines grabbing Ren by the front of his robes and shaking him. Hux’s arms are gone. So are his legs. Rage and bitter nausea rise until one or both of them feels close to tears. Hux can’t tell anymore.

_You were… installed… without my knowledge or approval. It was some time during the last week. Snoke showed me personally, when he ordered me to leave on this mission. It’s been about twelve hours since we departed._

**_Where are we?_ **

_My command shuttle, at the remains of a Sith shrine whose name has long been forgotten._

**_Snoke is here?_ **

_No. Just us and two droids. This planet has been uninhabited for centuries. I need solitude to complete my training successfully. Solitude and quiet._

_Well_ **_excuse me_ ** _for-_

Hux doesn’t know how to complete the thought other than with a sharp sensation of drowning, smothering pain. He feels something like a cringe, a shock of discomforted understanding. The rage wraps tighter around him.

_Show me what happened to you,_ Ren thinks.

_You don’t_ **_know?_ **

_I do not. Show me._

Hux remembers the throne room, the Knights of Ren standing in the shadows masked and anonymous.

He remembers the finality with which Snoke said, “That will be all, General.”

He remembers the anticipation crawling up his spine as he turned and walked toward the door.

Lightsabers cauterize when they cut flesh. It was painless at first, barely even felt until the room tilted around him and he hit the floor.

_You did it, didn’t you. He asked it of you._

Hux is more resigned than angry. It was inevitable and had been since they met. Ren’s rage flares. He punches the tube. Hux can feel the shock of it in Ren’s knuckles and the bones of his wrist. Distantly, he feels movement in the fluid he's suspended in.

**_You think I would- I just told you I didn’t know- And then make you show me-_ **

**_Enough_ ** _, Ren._ Hux doesn’t want this groundquake of sorrow and rage and rage at the sorrow. Ren needs to focus. They both need to focus. He has to analyze the situation. Calmly.

Hux stuffs his horror down into the same place he stuffs his rage. He can’t take a deep breath. He shoves down the panic. He tries to create some sort of space for himself, a pocket of cool air in the apocalyptic heat of Ren’s anger. The metaphor makes it easier. He can feel Ren testing the edges of it, watching.

_So. We’re in your Upsilon with no backup or support troops whatsoever? Please tell me there’s at least a flight crew._

_You and the droids are the only flight crew I am allowed. I was forbidden to… damage you._

_I don’t understand. How could I possibly act as flight crew?_

_The astronav droid can pilot. As can I, if necessary._

_You hate to pilot._

_We are already here. We will not leave until I complete my training._

The idea of being alone with Ren is slightly more palatable than the idea of there being any other witnesses to this. Ren’s mind ripples with anger and heat and nausea, but it’s better than drowning.

_I’m not hurting you?_ Ren asks, sudden, curious. The rage for a moment breaks and wavers.

_Are you trying to? Unsurprising._

_Not deliberately. But there is a reason my mind-touch is useful for torture._

_This is by far the lesser of two agonies, Ren. You were trying to help, keeping me unconcious. Weren’t you?_

Ren somehow manages to make his affirmation feel like a petulant shrug. Hux would roll his eyes, if he weren’t some sort of half disembodied-

_You are projecting quite clearly for a Force-blind neophyte._ Ren says.

_Don’t change the subject. I will not allow you to keep me in some coma indefinitely._ Though it would be a relief, to fall back down that well and never surface again. Ren catches the thought and alarm spikes through him.

**_You should not be able to fight me in this._ **

_Oh, fuck you and your Sith mysticism into the next galaxy. I may not have the Force but I am master of my own mind. Now, show me again. I will control myself this time._

_I’m not Sith._

_I am very well aware of that. Get on with it._

Ren doubts Hux’s control over himself. Hux can feel it. But he opens his eyes anyway.

Hux tries to focus on his own face, gaunt and stubble-covered and even paler than he remembers. The fluid is clear with a very faint bluish tinge. There are a lot of tubes and wires. Ren’s eyes keep straying down to the cauterized stump of his arm, then jerking back up again. His fingernails dig into his palm. His rage burns. Hux gropes desperately for some shield, remembers the bone-deep cold of Starkiller’s surface. It’s a poor choice, going unstable beneath him immediately.  

_Oh. Is that-_

_What?_

_Those diodes. Ren. Let me go. I need to try something._

Ren is reluctant, clutching and snarling into Hux’s mind. Hux remembers every time he’s had to break out of Ren’s hold, after an argument in the hallway or his office. To get out of bed and return to his duties. Ren lets him go and he falls from stifling heat into a lukewarm airless space churning with the sounds of machinery.

Hux thinks about swimming as a boy on Arkanis. He remembers diving down and hearing the rain drum on the surface of the water. He imagines himself holding his breath.

Hux opens his eyes. The curve of the tank distorts the room beyond. Ren’s bare palm is pressed to the transparisteel, white and bloodless. The look on Ren’s face hurts him. The pain in his chest rises up. He can still feel the way his boots fit, one foot raised mid-stride, just as he was when-

Ren pryes at the edge of his mind. Hux wills him away. He can’t lose concentration.

_Astronav,_ Hux thinks, picturing the diodes stuck to his temples, picturing the navigation display console from hundreds of simulations. _Status display._

On the inside of his closed eyelids, the display pops up. It wavers and dissolves if he tries to look at it too closely. It’s easier if he just glances, the way he would if he were actually in a piloting sim. He got top marks in them, of course, because he expected no less of himself. In simulations, he’s flown every type of ship deployed by the First Order and all the major craft used by the former Empire.

He thinks as loudly as he can: **_Ren. I need you to go to the cockpit and look at the astronav console._**

Ren tries again to latch onto Hux’s thoughts. Hux parries, gets distracted as the displays flicker. Ren slips himself into Hux’s mind like a long, thin blade inserted at the temple. His rage steadies Hux against the constant smothering of the fluid.

_What is this?_

_I think it’s a neural interface device. A direct connection to the ship’s computers. The Empire developed them as an improvement on manual controls in TIE fighters. They were a failure. The overstimulation ruined pilots’ responses and provoked extreme stress reactions. I had heard that the technology was reclaimed and in trial with specially conditioned troopers but this-_ His stomach drops. He doesn’t know if he still has a stomach. _Ren, just go to the cockpit so I can confirm that I’m actually receiving data. Make yourself useful._

Ren’s anger spikes a little, blade twisting inside his skull. Then, Hux feels Ren’s presence recede as he walks away. Hux keeps his eyes squeezed shut. He concentrates on holding his breath. He doesn’t feel the dizzy, blackout sensation of dropping blood oxygen levels. What he feels is his autonomic nervous system trying and failing to make his diaphragm move. Failing and signaling to the rest of his brain that panic is necessary to restore normal function.

His heart is pounding either with adrenaline or the sudden, clear understanding of what’s going on here. This is punishment for his failings - killed but denied the clean peace of death, mutilated and suspended in a tube to go insane while Kylo Ren paws through his every thought.

_It is a punishment for me too. Or a test._ Ren says. _I have already failed it. I should have let you scream._

_Kill me, then, and go finish your training._

_No._

_You do hate me._

_It is the highest honor I can afford you._

**_I_ ** _hate_ **_you._ **

He hates Kylo Ren so much.

_That is why you are still of use to me._

Hux wants to slap him, to lash out with fists and heels. But Ren’s mental presence is reduced by distance from a stabbing intrusion to a sure knowledge of being watched. His blows cannot land. He has no fists or heels. He cannot let himself think about it.

Hux tries instead to summon up more of the ship’s controls - a root directory or schematic. The input crashes through him in waves of static, sliding in and out of interpretable focus. He can still feel the ghost of his fists clenched hard, leather gloves pulled taut across his knuckles.

He’s going to pass out.

**_Hux._ **

_I’m here._

Ren rattles off the astronav data. Hux can’t sort through the input stream well enough to match it with anything. This is how he’s going to suffer for the rest of his existence, for as long as Snoke sees fit to keep him like this. Death would be preferable.

_Just shut it_ **_off_ ** _Hux you’re not like this you don’t_ **_GET_ ** _like this don’t you fucking_ **_dare_ ** _he ordered me not to let you I’d be alone again fuck you Hux_ **_fuck you NO_ **

Ren runs through the short corridor between the common room and the cockpit. Hux imagines he can feel Ren’s footfalls vibrating through the deck, through the transparisteel and into the wires and tubes and liquid against his skin. The static presses in all around him. It weighs Hux down into darkness.

The relief is short-lived. Ren is screaming and pounding his knuckles bloody against the tube. Hux can feel each blow propagate through the fluid.

**_STOP._ **

_If you let that thing_ **_begin_ ** _to consume your mind I’ll slice this tube open and rip it off even if it kills you._

_Good._ His approval pulls Ren up short. _Please do kill me before it drives me mad. I would vastly prefer that._

Hux can feel Ren’s eyes burning like he might cry.

**_IT WON’T. I WON’T LET YOU._ **

_That’s hardly comforting under the circumstances._

**_YOU HATE ME ENOUGH THAT YOU WOULD RATHER DIE THAN STAY-_ **

**_THERE IS NO WAY BACK FROM THIS. I’M ALREADY DEAD, REN. I. AM. ALREADY. DEAD._ **

Ren subsides, leaning his cheek against the transparisteel. The caldera of his rage wraps Hux’s mind in a toxic, unbreathable plume, suffocating, not drowning. Hux can feel him raging at _himself_ , at his own reactions, as if _his_ feeling of helplessness was somehow relevant to this situation. As if obsessing over his own weakness somehow makes him stronger.

_Are you really always this angry? How can you stand it?_ Hux finds it exhausting. He’d always thought Ren’s temper was at least in part an act. He’s seen Ren calm before, or at least freshly fucked into a stupor.

_Anger is the power of the Dark Side. I am preparing for my training._

_And what will that consist of?_

_I will create a new synth-crystal, to replace the flawed one I created when I was first initiated as Snoke’s apprentice. This time I will be fully successful. I will prove myself._

_How?_

_Raw elements are placed in a geological compressor, which creates the crystal itself. I must use the Force to manipulate the crystal’s shape and internal structure as it forms, to attune it to the Dark Side. At the same time, I must resist the heat generated by the compressor and all outside distractions. The process requires intense, sustained concentration, endurance and fine control. But the result is a pure expression of one’s connection to the Force._

_And you’ve done this before?_

_Yes._

_But it wasn’t fully successful._

_The crystal cracked after I set it in my saber’s hilt. Snoke decided it would benefit my training to use the flawed crystal. An exercise in control._

_And have you benefited?_

_Of course I have._ Ren snaps. _The Supreme Leader complimented me on my ability with even such a flawed weapon. This time I will prove my control. This time it will be perfect. And_ **_you_ ** _will stop interrupting my concentration._

Ren is going to leave him. Hux’s body is a drowning nightmare, his only sanctuary is the irritating, invading maelstrom of Ren’s mind and Ren has to leave. Starkiller base is gone. This is his punishment. Even though it was Ren’s fault. Even though the destruction of years of his life, his ambition and his genius is punishment in and of itself.

Hux is hit with a sudden, sharp longing for his own office aboard Starkiller base. It had been built exactly to his specifications, clean, neat, everything useful and in its place. A sanctuary where he could be alone with his work, free from distractions.

Now, he has no work to distract himself with.

_Leave, then._ Hux says. _I will control myself._

Ren doesn’t want to leave. But he slams a lid over the feeling before Hux can do more than glimpse it. He turns and marches through the airlock and down the Upsilon’s ramp. Hux can feel his rage receding, a torch borne away into the darkness until its light is lost entirely.

Hux thinks of rain drumming on the surface of water, far above.

He imagines holding his breath.

He waits.

 

\- - - -

 

Hux holds his tongue in between his teeth. He considers whether he would actually be able to bleed out, if he bit through it. It could be that the fluid he’s suspended in contains some clotting agent. The trace of blueness is likely bacta or a related compound. He could end up just mutilating himself further for nothing.

Hux holds his tongue between his teeth and feels it again, the creeping sensation of being watched. It’s too faint to discern much of anything about. It could be Ren, or Snoke, or his own overactive imagination. This is why solitary confinement and sensory deprivation are both effective means of softening up a prisoner; give the mind nothing to do and it will torture itself.

Hux has a choice to make. He can bite through his tongue and attempt to bleed out - no other means of escape from this situation is left to him. Or he can attempt to master the neural interface, madness be damned.

He can always bite his tongue later, if necessary.

And so, the neural interface. Hux hasn’t read up on the technical specifications. His engineering expertise is in high energy weapons systems, in clean, efficient, predictable physics. Neurology, psychology, learning theory, those were always his father’s special interests more than his. The interface must somehow make the output from the computer system interpretable by the brain. Perhaps by mimicking the input of sensory data from the peripheral nervous system, judging by the very visual display he had managed to access. And, he supposes, it can pick up his brain activity and translate that into input for the computer. Somehow.

This nightmarish lack of technical specifications also extends to the whatever systems are keeping him alive. Hux has never wondered what it might take to undermine his loyalty to the Supreme Leader. He never could have imagined something like this.

Ren said he would kill Hux rather than let him go mad.

This shouldn’t be different than learning any new thing. It will become easier with practice. He just needs to keep himself from being overwhelmed. Isolate each system until it becomes second nature. He will do this because he’ll be damned if he lets _anyone_ have the satisfaction of breaking him.

Hux pictures himself in a flight simulator, remembers the Upsilon main control console in as much detail as he can. He waves away the feeling of eyes on the back of his neck. He tries and fails to shut off the part of his brain which is still attempting to make his lungs fill. He imagines a schematic of the shuttle’s systems onto the main screen and begins.

One moment he is flipping idly through the exterior camera feeds and the next moment Hux is drowning. Needles burn in his flesh, dripping icy poison into his veins. The stump of his arm connects with something hard and he gags on the pain and the tube snaking down his throat. His eyes are burning and Ren isn’t pulling him out of this nightmare, he’s alone, he’s going to drown forever, he can’t do anything but drown, would die outside the tube, this is it this is his existence until Snoke or Ren snuffs him out in a fit of temper it would be better where is Ren he could bite his tongue-

_HUX._

Ren sounds as if he’s shouting from a distant room. Hux _reaches._ He grabs hold of Ren and feels anger, heat, flabbergasted surprise. Ren’s attention is divided - that’s right, he’s growing his magic crystal. Hux interrupted him.

Hux crashes back into his own body. The impact throbs in his temples. His heart is racing.

_Swimming on Arkanis._ Ren calls. _Focus. Control your fear._

Rain drumming on the surface of the water. Sinking in the cool, green twilight under the lily pads.

That’s right. The tube. The shuttle. His punishment. Hux focuses on his mental image of the control panel, imagines glancing at the chrono. It has been about five hours since he last checked it, and nearly twenty four since he first figured out how to access the chrono display.

**_Ren?_ **

_You are interrupting a very delicate process with your histrionics._

**_Did I fall asleep?_ **

_Yes. It was the most peace I’ve gotten since I started._

Hux can feel Ren’s anger. His impatience. His exhausted weariness. He’s been awake continuously since he left the shuttle, which was an unknown amount of time before Hux’s first look at the chrono.

**_How is your crystal?_ **

_It would be better if you would_ **_leave me alone._ **

Hux doesn’t want to. He has a sense that Ren also doesn’t want to cut their connection, that he hadn’t imagined Ren’s distant eye examining him. Ren has been worried about him.

Ren knows that he knows. Ren snaps their connection shut like a security door slamming down.

Hux thinks of the green lakes of Arkanis. He imagines the control console. The exterior camera feed flickers back onto his imaginary display screen. The entrance to the shrine looks the same - a grey cliff-face carved into a narrow split pyramid supported  by a facade of columns. The door is a black and crumbling hole, no movement visible anywhere. This planet is tidally locked to its star, the temple carved into a deep canyon, bathed in perpetual twilight. The environmental sensor array tells him that the air is thin and cold. The wind blows fine sand and snow across the gap of the canyon above at vicious, scouring speeds. It is as close to eternal night as is still habitable for most humanoids.

Hux is glad he was unconscious for their landing here. The astronav droid must have pulled it off. He can’t imagine how a human pilot could do it without that wind slamming the shuttle straight into the canyon wall.

He’s detected no damage in his tour of the shuttle’s systems so far. He has, however, encountered a number of security encryptions locking him out of certain systems: the hyperdrive controls are completely blocked off, as are weapons and the shuttle’s internal environmental controls. Whatever life support system runs his tube isn’t connected to the rest of the system.

Apparently Snoke didn’t want Ren’s new piloting system to get uppity.

It’s unfair that Hux feels so exhausted when all he’s done (all he will ever do ever again) is float in a tube and think. But Hux doesn’t want to sleep. He doesn’t want to wake up again into the dream of drowning, into the panic of a pointless fight or flight reaction. His ability to visualize the console begins to waver in and out as he loses concentration. He starts checking the chrono more frequently, catching himself losing time. Staring at the seconds ticking over is a bad, terrible idea, mesmerizing, not productive or distracting enough. The camera feeds might as well be static pictures. This canyon is lifeless. The wind strokes high keening notes off the planes of rock. Hux can hear them through his external microphones. He can hear them very faintly with his own ears over the churning of his artificial organs.

He can still feel his gloves pulled tight across his knuckles, the fit of his boots, the tension in his gut, the pain. They are ghosts he has to live with. He has no choice.

The view through his exterior cameras doesn’t change and the view in the interior cameras doesn’t change and he doesn’t look through the cameras in the common room, where he was _installed._ He checks the chrono again and it feels like time isn’t passing, it hasn’t even been a minute. He checks it again.

He checks it again and feels vibration on the exterior ramp. He feels Ren’s heavy tread dragging up the ramp and doesn’t consider that feeling or its origin before _throwing_ himself at Ren’s mind.

In his forward corridor camera he sees Ren stumble as if struck.

It’s like tumbling into a warm space after hours of trudging through a blizzard. It’s wordless and desperate and exhausted - Ren is all of these things. Ren is clutching something in his hand which throbs, which sticks into his mind needle-like behind his eye socket and Hux does not like that. He needs Ren’s mind, a shelter from himself. He needs to sleep, and he’s not sure whose thought that is. Ren has been awake for forty five hours. He feels sunburned all over from the heat of the geological compressor.

Hux would have to switch his camera view to the common room to see Ren collapse on the padded bench, truncated to make room for the life support system. He can feel Ren’s feet dangling off the end in their heavy boots. The helmet cuts awkwardly into the back of his neck until he reaches up to disengage it. He squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t want to see the tube.

Ren is unhappy. He’s so tired he’s more unhappy than angry, is torn up and sore inside, skin tight and dry, hips sore from sitting cross legged in meditation. He thinks that something is _wrong with Hux_ which makes Hux want to laugh hysterically, possibly until he dies.

And then they are somewhere _else_ . Stars move gently past the viewport. Ren is laid back on the conference table, hair pooled around his head, Hux’s hands infiltrating his robes. They are on the _Finalizer_ , Hux remembers this. After a moment he remembers well enough to parse which set of hands are his memory and which are Ren’s (limp on the table top where Hux had just pinned his wrists). They had argued. They had always argued. They had argued themselves into a dark, deserted conference room on deck C. He’d laid Ren out on the conference table and taken him to pieces with his mouth, and Ren had snarled and yanked his hair and insulted him the whole time.

The memory hadn’t gone like this: Ren staring up at him, unshed tears standing at the corners of his eyes. Ren yanking him down by his lapels and shoving his face into Ren’s shoulder, as if that would keep Hux from feeling his shame and rage and horror and regret. Their legs dangle awkwardly off the end of the table but Hux finds himself sinking into the warmth of Ren’s chest, fingers tangled in his hair, face mashed into his neck. The memory hadn’t gone like this. It had been a quick fuck to blow off tension, something they did occasionally and never lingered on or discussed. Hux thinks they should lock the door, someone might come in, and he hears the beep-thunk of the door lock engaging and then he finally lets himself collapse.


	2. Chapter 2

The first crystal has a flaw so large Ren doesn’t even get it all the way installed in the lightsaber. It sails free of the mounting and clatters across the floor when Ren throws the whole mess across the shuttle’s common room.

He yells at Hux that it’s his fault, even though he blames himself. Hux can feel it and Ren knows Hux can feel it. He was weak and worried and distracted, thinking Hux might not be there, that he might come back to a corpse pickled in that tube. He’s still weak and imperfect and torn by the call of the Light. What if killing his father did nothing? What if Snoke’s faith in him is misplaced?

 Ren storms back into the temple in a towering rage. Hux is glad, at first, to have him out of his head.

 The second crystal works. It takes just under twenty six hours to create, during which time Hux does not feel Ren’s prying eyes at the edge of his mind. He works on communicating with the two droids, the small medical droid and the larger astronav droid which sees no reason to leave the cockpit. Neither of them are fully sentient; their AI is highly specialized to their programmed tasks and their decision making capacity is limited. But they are mobile, they have limbs and actuators and tools. Hux could use them, he thinks, if he can just figure out a way to access their internal drives.

 When Ren returns, his impotent rage has been tempered by triumph. He holds the crystal up, to show Hux in the tube. Hux looks at it through Ren’s eyes instead. It is a deep, light-absorbing black, an absence of color Hux can feel in Ren’s fingertips.

 Ren has to repair a crack in the lightsaber casing before he can set the crystal. When he turns it on, the three blades are steady and strong in a way they never were before.

 Ren stares at it. There is a tension building in the room, a subliminal hum like a ship’s generator spinning up and up, turbines heading for catastrophic failure.

 Ren lets out a strangled cry of rage. He brings the saber down on the common room table, shearing it in half. The tip of the saber lodges into the deck plating, red hot metal running, and then there is a shower of sparks and an earsplitting **pop.**

The saber hilt clatters to the ground, inactive. Ren clutches his hand to his chest.

 Ren could easily have slashed through something important - the hull, the reactor casing, Hux’s artificial organs churning in the base of his tube. And Hux finds himself unaccountably terrified, as if Ren had turned the saber on himself. As if he doesn’t want that.

 He has never feared Ren so deeply before. The sensation is unpleasant.

 The common room is very still. The gouged floor plating ticks as it cools. The cauterized line across Hux’s torso throbs. He can feel Ren clenching his teeth until they ache.

  _What was that about?_ Hux finally asks.

  _It’s_ **_purple._**

_Is that not as expected? It looked like it was working well?_

 Ren’s only reply is a frustrated below. He stomps into the officers’ cabin and slams Hux out of his mind. Hux rolls his eyes. The medidroid attempts to go check Ren for injuries. Ren ignores its tapping on his door.

 Much later, after Ren has slept and eaten three ration bars, Hux manages to drag an explanation out of him. Predictably, it’s some mystical screed about the Dark Side and his personal connection to it. Hux carefully avoids stating any opinions, or even letting them surface in his mind.

The offending crystal split in half inside the lightsaber hilt anyway. Ren stomps back into the temple to try again.

He doesn’t come back. At the seventy-two hour mark, Hux finally gets the navdroid setup for remote control. He sends the two droids after Ren, dragging one of the thin bunk mattresses as a makeshift travois. 

Hux watches through the droids’ optics as they navigate a maze of halls and empty rooms. The spaces are narrow and very tall, disappearing up into shadow which the droids’ small lights cannot penetrate. Hux has them follow the right hand wall, a methodical search pattern which requires no input from him, in case they go beyond his transceivers’ range. 

Ren is unconcious on the floor just outside of a large and elaborate shrine. It is by far the most highly decorated piece of the temple Hux has seen, and has been spared the weathering that the exterior has suffered. Spiky flourishes and blocks of stylized text frame the small aperture of the geological compressor. The medidroid reads the ambient temperature in the room as far warmer than the hallway, which is in turn warmer than the rest of the temple. That is probably why Ren is only slightly hypothermic instead of dead. 

The droids wrap him in an emergency blanket and roll him onto the mattress. Dragging it back to the shuttle is a long and grueling operation. Neither of these droids were designed for heavy lifting of any kind. The medidroid is only meant for field first aid and assisting more qualified medical technicians. The navdroid wasn’t built for any labor harder than crunching astronav data. Their servos whine up the long, shallow ramps which lead to the surface. Ren begins to shiver. The medidroid registers it autonomously and checks his core temperature. Hux hasn’t been able to get into most of its programming, yet.

Ren wakes up as the droids try to maneuver him through the temple door. Maybe it’s the cold or the howling wind that jolt him. Hux can see him in the exterior forward camera suddenly sit bolt upright, then topple over as the mattress is dragged another meter. He rolls to his feet, lightsaber in hand, and with two quick slashes makes slag out of the navdroid. The medidroid at least has enough programmed self-preservation to flee. Hux activates the ramp closure as soon as all its little wheels are aboard and brings up the deflector shields. 

Ren has by this point reduced the mattress to a smouldering pile and carved a couple of disrespectful gouges in the shrine’s doorframe. Hux’s mental touch seems to pass through him like a hologram. He’s too far, or too angry, or maybe Hux is just delusional thinking he can reach out to Ren in any way. Hux has never had any inkling of Force sensitivity. Could irrational confidence in an ability he does not have be an artifact of the neural interface? He shouldn’t be able to touch Ren’s mind at all. _Ren_ is he one who invades _his._  

If Ren keeps this tantrum up he’s going to bring that heavy stone lintel down on top of himself. 

Hux engages one of the forward guns and fires a warning shot, carefully calculated to miss the ancient carvings. Ren turns on him with an incoherent snarl. The next two warning shots are ricocheted back into the shields by the whirl of Rens’ saber. The blades are an even deeper purple than last time, strong and steady and pleasingly proportioned. 

Hux activates the exterior speakers, unsure what, if anything, he will be able to make come out of them. 

He does not expect his own voice. 

“Another three steps and you’ll walk right into the deflector shields.” 

Ren freezes, eyes rounding. 

And _there’s_ Ren, finally, flooding confusion and frantic hope and fear into Hux’s mind. 

 _The exterior speakers._ Hux explains. _But look, I managed to bypass the encryption on the weapons controls._  

 _You_ **_shot_ ** _me._  

_No I didn’t, you’re perfectly fine. Other than mild hypothermia, dehydration and exhaustion. Those are your own fault, not mine._

Ren barks a bitter laugh. It crackles in the vocoder. Hux can feel how dry his throat is. He lets the lightsaber droop toward the remains of their navdroid.

 _At least you’ve got that stupid thing working. Now shut it off and come inside._  

Ren looks down at the saber, bitterness rising off him until Hux can almost see it in the camera feed. 

 _It’s still_ **_wrong._**  

 _Well for stars’ sake, at least warm up, eat and rest before you do anything else._  

 _I can’t._  

 _Is this kind of self-flagellation a mysterious Sith right of passage, or just something you get off on? Because it can’t possibly be conducive to good results. Now_ **_turn that thing off_ ** _and get inside. That’s an order._  

Ren glowers at the shuttle behind his helmet. Hux can feel how very badly he wants to enter, to feel warm and sheltered and not alone anymore. To feel welcome. Hux drops the shields and lowers the ramp. 

 _I_ **_can’t._**  

Ren turns and stalks back into the temple. 

 _Ren! Of all the overdramatic-  Fine. I’m going to send the medidroid after you with water and hot food and if you so much as scratch its chassis I will torpedo that temple down on your head._  

 _The Upsilon doesn’t have torpedoes._  

 _I_ **_would_ ** _take off and leave you here but_ **_SOMEONE_ ** _just destroyed our navdroid._

_The air currents around the canyon are too unpredictable to navigate without the Force. I advise you not to try it._

Hux squeezes off another burst from the forward cannons out of sheer frustration. A column explodes in a satisfying shower of fragments.

 _Now who’s being childish?_  

 _WHO CARES WHETHER THE DAMN THING IS PURPLE?_  

 **_DO NOT QUESTION MY LOYALTY TO THE DARK SIDE._**  

 **_WHAT? HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE?_**  

Ren is pacing. Hux’s microphones register his footsteps echoing back and forth through the colonnaded entrance hall. 

 _As I_ **_told_ ** _you. The synthetic crystal is the_ **_essence_ ** _of the creator’s connection to the Force. Attunement to the Dark Side makes crystals_ **_red_ ** _. They are a distillation of pure_ **_hatred_ ** _. It is_ **_YOUR_ ** _fault I cannot-_  

 _Spare me the mysticism. I remember enough about physical chemistry to know that the impurities in a carbon crystal are what determines the color. Are you certain you’re starting with the correct raw materials? Isn’t there some kind of, I don’t know, manual? Ancient Sith documentation? Are there any archives in this place?_  

Ren’s footsteps pause. Hux has a sense of great pressure building behind the temple facade, not unlike the sense of impending explosion before Ren’s tantrum in the common room. On one hand, Ren wants to believe that it could be something so simple, so easily and directly fixable as the blend of starting materials. On the other hand, Ren knows what Snoke would say - that he’s weak, that his loyalty is faulty, that his attachment to the Light must be purged. That Hux is holding him back, ensnaring him in a tangle of _feelings._  

 _If that’s the case, why would Snoke have forbidden you to kill me?_ Hux asks. _Why would he have you kill your father and not kill me off too?_  

Hux sees a brief flash of the look on Han Solo’s face as Ren’s lightsaber pierces his chest _(how_ **_dare_ ** _he forgive me how_ **_dare_ ** _he)_. Ren snatches it back, resenting Hux, resenting himself. 

 _To kill you now would be an act of mercy. To let you live is an act of cruelty._  

 _I agree._  

 _It is a test. I have already failed it._  

 _It is torture for both of us. Snoke set you up to fail. Again._  

 **_No. NO._**  

Ren strides down the ramp into the mountain. After a few minutes of ringing silence, Hux sends the medidroid out to gather up what remains of the navdroid. With any luck its processors and memory chips will still be salvageable. He decides not to send the medidroid after Ren, even though he said he would. It’s his only reliable set of hands, now. It is too valuable of an asset to risk. 

Ren can just dehydrate into an overdramatic Sith mummy in there, if he's not willing to see reason. 

Hux has sunken down into a haze by the time Ren comes back. He’s fixed his mind on a camera feed of snow streaming over top of the canyon on the wind, the whistle of its passage playing through the shipboard speakers. It is both chaotic and monotonous, distracting and lulling. 

He feels Ren at the edge of his mind before he feels his tread on the ramp, probing cautiously. 

 _You are meditating?_ Ren asks. 

 _Sleeping._  

 _Not really._  

 _No. Did you make another one?_  

 _No. I did not attempt to._  

Hux sees the darkness of his quarters on the Finalizer, lit only by the red digits of his chrono. The two of them are laying awake and exhausted during an off shift, side by side in the narrow bunk but not touching. 

This is not a real memory. 

 _There was an archive in the temple. Or, at least, a room with shelves and scroll racks. There was nothing left in there. I searched very thoroughly._  

Hux glances at the chrono in the illusion of his quarters. It has been nearly three hours since their argument. Ren is even more desperately thirsty, and so hungry his hands are shaking. 

Hux imagines shoving him out of the narrow bunk. 

 _Go take care of yourself._  

 _I am._  

Overlaid on his quarters, like a particularly vivid fantasy, he sees an insta-meal self-heating on the floor in the common room. He sees Ren’s hands, helmet dangling limp from one and water bottle clutched in the other. He can feel the uncomfortable slump of Ren’s spine against the hard-backed bench. Hux had had the droids drag the remains of the table into storage before he sent them after Ren. 

 _What now?_ Hux asks. 

 _You should sleep._  

 _You’re not angry with me. I thought you would be._  

 _You do not know Leader Snoke as I do. Your hatred is justified by your circumstances. It is, perhaps, even to be encouraged._  

Hux brings up common room camera two. He glares at the image of Ren shoveling rehydrated stew into his mouth and hopes he’ll choke on it. 

 _Interesting. You don’t realize what you’re doing, do you?_  

 _I realize that the Supreme Leader has sentenced me to indefinite imprisonment and torture with no recourse other than provoking_ **_you_ ** _into disobeying his orders. I further realize that you are too loyal to him to grant me anything like a dignified end._  

Hux has known this since he became fully cognizant of his circumstances. It should not be so bitter to put words to it. In the not-memory of his quarters, Ren putters around the fresher, light spilling from the open door. A datapad in Hux’s hand shows him the feed from common room camera two. Hux is sitting up in bed. He can feel smooth sheets and a scratchy regulation issue blanket under his bare legs.

 _This isn’t about what Snoke wants. I already told you I failed._  

 _Your selfishness never ceases to amaze me._  

He imagines the door to the fresher slamming shut and locking Ren in. He pulls the covers up over his shoulders, curls on his side with his back to the room, and wills himself to sleep. His bunk was never big enough for two. 

Ren knocks on the door. 

 _Go away._  

 _I should have realized long ago how strong you are. This experience has opened your mind._  

 _Go_ **_away_ ** _, Ren._  

He imagines an airlock in place of his fresher, imagines venting the compartment and ejecting Kylo Ren into space. Hux smiles to himself. An old fantasy, still satisfying. 

Ren chuckles. On the screen of the data pad he stretches out on the hard, narrow bench of the common room and pulls his cloak up over his head.

 

\- - - -

 

Ren is poking him. If it were Phasma or Mitaka interrupting his rest period, Hux would know there was some kind of emergency. But it’s just Ren, inviting himself into Hux’s quarters and harassing him like the disrespectful, overgrown child he is. Hux is having none of it. 

There’s something wrong with the engines. Their harmonics are pitched entirely too high, the vibration far too intense. And Ren is just prodding at him idly, not actually waking him up to inform him of a shipwide emergency. Where the hell is Phasma? Why hasn’t anyone commed him? 

Hux fumbles for his data pad and comes all the way awake when he can’t make his fist unclench. 

He is _not_ drowning. He does _not_ panic. But it’s a near thing. 

Ren is in the Upsilon’s pilot seat, hands on the controls, engines fully warmed up and poised to take off. He's still got marks on his cheek from sleeping in his cloak. Hux can see them in the cockpit camera. 

 _Ren? What-_  

 _Hux!_  

Ren’s mind _engulfs_ him. Hux can feel his (Ren’s) palms steady against the throttle control, Ren’s (his) hair falling in his eyes, muscles in his shoulders corded with anticipation of Hux isn’t sure what. 

Poised, waiting, hands light on the controls, not thinking of how it felt to sit in someone’s lap at the controls of a starship (Hux wouldn’t know). Think instead of the time he pinned Hux to the wall in the fresher, arms wrapped around Hux’s lean shoulders, hands wrapped over his on the controls and the moment is coming the moment is now, GO.

Ren jams the throttle control all the way to maximum. The shuttle leaps off the ground. 

Everything shakes. The Upsilon’s stabilizers strain against their mountings as the gale hits them from both sides at once. They are like sails and Ren has to fight to hold the shuttle steady against the cross currents of wind. This wouldn’t even be possible if the atmosphere was thicker, Hux thinks wildly, they’d be torn apart. But they are barreling down the canyon, skimming over grey hoodoos and drifts of sand. The wind screams and Ren is flying without even thinking, hands moving by pure instinct, trusting that some mysterious information will fall into his head from nowhere and keep them from getting killed.  

 Hux can’t bear that. He wants to know. He wants to plan and anticipate. The stabilizers are groaning. Hux can feel them almost like someone is yanking on his arms, like trying to hang from a bar that’s being violently shaken. They clench their jaw against the vibration. Their breath is fast in their nostrils. It’s been so long since Hux could feel the air but now he can feel it in the cockpit, in the cabins, can feel the gusts buffeting the hull. He can see the coriolis spirals of the wind breaking over the edges of the canyon. There, chaotic turbulence where the air moves around a rock spire. There, ahead, the wind-shear where the gorge drops down into a mountain-ringed valley. They are flying toward the sun and its meager heat has everything lifting, expanding into an immense updraft that will carry them high into the atmosphere, out of danger.

 Hux can feel Ren’s hands light on the controls. They are viciously _alive_ as they deploy the stabilizers and soar upwards.

 When they’re safely settled in an orbit, Ren throws himself out of the pilot’s chair. He stumbles his way back to the common room and plasters himself to Hux’s tube.

  _I knew it!  You did well, Hux, better than I imagined._

  _I didn’t do anything. Stop pawing at that thing. Don’t look at it._

 Hux doesn’t want to see himself, unshaven, mutilated, blue and dead looking. Ren won’t not look and so he imagines himself in his flight simulator, peeling free of Ren’s mind like a too-tight garment.

_No no no, don’t, here just-_

A memory: Ren surging up against him, pinning him hard against the hallway wall right outside a briefing room on the _Finalizer._ Pinning him and kissing him with bruising sloppiness. Hux had just concluded a meeting about delays on component manufacturing for Starkiller base. He’d bawled out their supplier’s representative then reduced one of the lieutenants to tears and ordered him to report to reconditioning. Ren hadn’t said a word the entire meeting, but the moment they were alone, this.

Hux had shoved him off, of course. It was a public hallway. But Hux had also ordered Ren to follow and removed them to a more appropriate location for such activities. It was the first time they’d had a sexual encounter when they weren’t particularly angry at each other. It had been most satisfactory, once the small issue of public indecency was settled.

In this, the not-memory, Hux grabs a double handful of Ren’s hair and pulls steadily until Ren stops biting at him. He presses their foreheads together. He can feel Ren’s breath on his cheek. The background hum of the Finalizer is comforting. Hux hadn’t realized that he misses it.

Ren is so happy. Giddy, almost. Hux isn’t sure how to manage feelings of this intensity happening right inside his own, usually composed and organized mind. He doesn’t know where Ren’s feelings end. Establish facts first.

_Did you finally get your red crystal? How long was I asleep?_

_Hux!  Grandfather sent me a vision!_

Hux’s sense of impending doom is a tiny trickle next to the roaring falls of Ren’s pride. Hux wishes desperately for caf. He wishes he could press against his temples to combat the headache gathering there.

_And this vision told you leave your magical crystal forge? Why?_

_The vision revealed to me the method needed to complete my training. I could not employ it where we were, so we left. I’ve got the system calculating course now. More importantly: you. You felt the Force._

Hux doesn’t feel it necessary to engage such a transparently untrue statement. Instead he probes yet again at the navigational controls. They are blank and impenetrable behind the white noise of encryption.

_I can’t access the hyperdrive systems. The navdroid - you remember, the one you chopped up for no reason? - had all the encryption keys._

The remains of the navdroid are still scattered around the cockpit floor. Hux needs to make some software upgrades to the medbot before it can patch the intact drives back into the computer system. Then, he’ll have to figure out which files were the encryption keys for the hyperdrive.

_I told you I already set course. You’ll have plenty of time to fix it on the way._

_On the way_ **_where?_ **

_Tatooine. Stop trying to change the subject._

**_WHAT? You realize that is on the opposite side of the galaxy deep in Republic-aligned territory where there is a very large bounty on both of our heads._ **

_Grandfather told me to go!_

He sounds so happy.

_Your dead grandfather told you to go to Tatooine._

_I know you saw the vision too, Hux. I felt you there._

Hux had dreamed of a crumbling dome, a rusted out tower, white dunes reflecting the light of two suns.

_Ridiculous._

_HA! I_ **_knew_ ** _you saw it. The home of Obi-Wan Kenobi - the place where Luke Skywalker forged his synth-crystal._

 _And how, exactly, would_ **_that_ ** _be a better setting for forging some kind of Dark Force crystal than a Sith temple?_

 _I will_ **_desecrate_ ** _it. Pollute it so thoroughly that no trace of the Light remains. It will be a warning to Skywalker and a victory for the Dark Side._

Ren radiates smugness. He’s leaving long, streaky fingerprints all over Hux’s tube.

_You were right that my raw materials were inadequate. Grandfather has given me the knowledge I lacked, through this seeing. I am to forge the crystal out of his remains and thus inherit his strength._

_Is that even possible? I thought the crystal needed to be primarily carbon._

_The actual material matters less than its resonance with the Force._

Hux has no real reply to that but despair. He runs some calculations. The Upsilon was not meant for long distance travel. Its generator is underpowered for even the low end hyperdrive that it’s equipped with.

_Ren, you realize it will take us weeks to reach the opposite side of the galaxy. Assuming we can do so without attracting unwanted attention. The Upsilon isn’t exactly low-profile. Do you even have the credits for food and fuel? You’re not just going to romp through Republic space in those robes, either. That would be moronic, even for you._

Ren actually laughs aloud.

 _I haven’t_ **_paid_ ** _for anything since I was a child.  And the length of the trip will give us time to train. By the time we reach Tatooine you will have enough control of your powers to stay out of the forging process. That will make things much easier._

 **_I_ ** _do_ **_not_ ** _have_ **_‘powers’_ ** _Ren. Do not try to pin_ **_your_ ** _magical failings on_ **_me._ **

_You do. You saw the winds for me. You felt the Force flowing through the shuttle. I know you did._

_That was_ **_you._ ** _I can’t feel the Force. You_ **_made_ ** _me._

_How many times have you had a gut feeling, acted on instinct, known the right move to make or the right words to say before your brain could fully analyze the situation? That is the Force moving through you, as it moves through all living things._

Hux cannot and will not accept the idea that his decisions are made for him by some sort of arbitrary, unmeasurable magic field. His capacity for choice is his entirely to the credit of his own discipline, intelligence and training.

 _The true difference between a Force-sensitive and a non-Force-sensitive is just that - the ability to_ **_perceive_ ** _the Force. It must be felt before it can be consciously manipulated. What Snoke has done to you has simply activated your latent Force sensitivity. Perhaps that was the real point of this exercise. Your potential was powerful but deeply buried. It took sufficient trauma-_

 _You expect me to be_ ** _glad_** _I’ve been_ ** _reduced_** _to a useless sack of meat pickled in a jar just because it_ ** _supposedly_** _made me feel_ ** _the Force?_** _Should I com Snoke and_ ** _thank_** _him for this_ _opportunity?_ _I’m_ ** _done_** _with this, Ren. I’m done with_ ** _you._**

Hux slams the door to his mind as forcefully as he can. He imagines it’s a vault, a heavily fortified ship bristling with guns and deflector shields and patrolling squadrons of fighters.

He can’t feel the shuttle. Distantly he can hear Ren yelling. He pretends that he can’t make out the words. He floats and does not open his eyes. He reminds himself that he’s not drowning. He counts his heartbeats and feels the hum of the hyperdrive spooling up. He does not check the cameras or the status displays or the any of the various sensor arrays which the Upsilon has onboard.

He’s NOT drowning.

He’s not drowning.

He’s not.


	3. Chapter 3

Their first stop is an automated refueling platform near the edge of First Order space.  Hux uses the internal speaker system to object, imagining the interface as a standard com unit. Hux points out that this will alert Snoke that they’ve deviated from the mission. Ren insists that he’s following Snoke’s orders. Hux is unable to overrule him because he’s still locked out of half the navigation controls. After a brief and unproductive argument, Hux retreats back into his mental fortress.

Using the neural interface gives him a disconcerting sense of the Upsilon as a whole, as a body. As _his_ body. Ren stands out in that sense like a melodramatic foreign object. Once Hux acknowledges his presence at all it becomes much more difficult to keep Ren out of his head. Because Kylo Ren _would_ try to get into Hux’s mind even after Hux made it unequivocally clear that he was not welcome. Of course he would.

Upsilon-class command shuttles just don’t have the space on board for long-distance-ready hyperdrives. Furthermore, without the navdroid the computer is abysmally slow at course calculations. Thier travel consists of short jumps with long pauses in between as the hyperdrive spools back up and the computer grinds the numbers. It’s boring, especially sitting in his mental fortress in this state of forced idleness. Hux should be working on the remains of the navdroid, cobbling it back into something the ship’s computer can access. Ren should be helping him. Instead they have barely spoken even when Ren occasionally tries to break through Hux’s mental armor.

Three standard days of stubbornly not speaking later, they stop at some backwater smugglers’ port to refuel. It’s remote enough to be strategically unimportant but big enough that a First Order ship stands some chance of being lost in a crowd. Hux activates the speakers and grills Ren on how he plans to disguise their presence. Ren gives unsatisfactory answers. The idea that Hux could avoid detection by pretending that the Upsilon is some other, unremarkable ship is childishly absurd.

What they should do is simply land, refuel and take off again in as little time as possible. Hux is of the opinion Ren shouldn’t even leave the ship.

“What, exactly, do you plan to do in town?” Hux asks, through the speakers.

Ren hunches further into his cloak, helmet securely on. “I am under no obligation to explain. Open the ramp.”

Hux has a flash of inspiration. “On the condition that you run an errand for me. So I can be assured that your little excursion isn’t a completely pointless danger to our security.”

Ren pauses for a long moment. Hux imagines his jaw clenching stubbornly under the helmet. He does not try to touch Ren’s mind. Ren, for once, does not attempt to probe his mental shields.

“What errand?”

“Procure me a maintenance droid. One with low intelligence, preferably.” Less to reprogram that way. “You owe me that much for the damage you’ve done to my shuttle.”

For a moment Hux thinks Ren is about to lash out and punch the wall. As if he needs yet another dent in his bulkheads.

“Fine,” Ren says.

Hux lowers the ramp and Ren stomps off into the thin crowd. Hux watches him slip through the milling humanoids without attracting much notice at all. He supposes the Force does have its uses, if one is not busy being a reckless idiot.

Hours later, Ren still has not returned. A droid arrives and offers a delivery chit marked with their stall in the spaceport. It's an old WED-15 model repair droid, worn and fragile-looking but with a decent selection of tools and manipulators on its spidery arms. Hux grudgingly admits to himself that Ren did well. If only he would get back here so they could leave.

Ren has run off into the lawless spaceport without even a communicator, even though Hux reminded him to take one. But it _has_ been a relief to have a few hours alone, a break from keeping his mental walls in place.

The repair droid trundles up the ramp on its little treads. Hux directs it to plug into the cockpit uplink. He needs to run some diagnostics and see what kind of tasks it’s already programmed for.

He feels incredibly stupid when the droid locks him out of the system and starts warming up the engines. Presumably, it won’t be able to go anywhere with Snoke’s encryptions on the nav system. But this will not stand. Hux will not allow _anyone_ to hijack _his_ shuttle, much less a preprogrammed droid with mediocre AI capabilities.

Because it _is_ his. He can feel the Upsilon like skin, bones and muscle. He can feel the insect bite of the droid’s connection and he can swat it just as easily. With a pop and a fizz of sparks, the droid’s uplink jack snaps off its appendage. The droid backpedals, beeping in alarm. Hux seals it in the airlock as it tries to flee.

“Damage anything and I will crush you into scrap,” he tells it through the speaker. It cowers, folding up its arms and backing into a corner. It’s more intelligent that it was supposed to be, also. It remains to be seen if that’s a good thing or a bad one.

Hux steels himself then shouts with all the mental force he can muster:

**_KYLO REN. THE DROID YOU PICKED OUT JUST ATTEMPTED TO HIJACK ME._ **

A minor volcano of rage erupts on the far side of town. Its vibration is so distinct Hux almost feels the discarded insta-meal containers rattle on the floor.

 **_I HAVE THE SITUATION IN HAND,_ ** he calls. **_RETURN TO THE SHIP IMMEDIATELY. WE’RE LEAVING._ **

That lava flow of rage carves a path through the port, moving steadily closer. Without the droid actively jamming it, the shuttle’s systems are righted quickly. Hux reboots a few subroutines and sets the medibot to picking up the trash littering Ren’s cabin. He keeps the engines in their warm-up cycle.

**_I will not allow you on board if you do not calm down._ **

Ren’s reply is a distant and inarticulate scream. Hux’s temples are starting to pound.

Nearly a dozen meter-tall insectoid aliens converge on their stall. They are thinking, loudly, about their droid and its transmission that it had failed to secure a very valuable ship. Hux manages to catch the closest in the deflector shield as it powers up. Portions of it splatter onto the freighter parked in the next stall. The insectoids draw blasters and fire.

The crowd milling around the parked ships begins to scatter. A few unfortunates are too busy staring at the firefight to notice the approach of Kylo Ren. He mows them down and continues his charge into the would-be hijackers’ backs. The purple saber whirls. Hux picks off those uninjured enough to crawl away.

**_HUX._ **

**_I’m fine. Shut that thing off and get in here. DO NOT let the droid out of the airlock. I still need it._ **

Ren makes a completely unnecessary display of vaulting to the secondary access hatch on the top of the shuttle. The moment his hands touch the hull, Hux can feel his mind lit up with adrenaline and relief. He tumbles inside and plasters himself to Hux’s tube like this is some kind of absurd Republic stage drama.

_Hux._

_I told you I’m_ **_fine._ ** _No thanks to_ **_your_ ** _neglect of common sense security protocols. Stop touching that and get to the cockpit._

_What did it do to you?_

_It plugged in to run diagnostics and attempted to fly the ship somewhere. I stopped it._

_How did you stop it?_

Ren thinks he already know. Ren thinks Hux will have to admit to using the Force now.

Ren for once may be correct, much as Hux dislikes that idea.

_Go look in the cockpit._

Ren is delighted when he finds the broken stub of the droid’s jack in the interface port.

 _I_ **_knew_ ** _I felt you moving the Force. You actually broke through steel. You’re much stronger than I thought possible for someone coming so late into their powers. You need training._

 **_We_ ** _need to get off this dirtball before any more would-be hijackers arrive. We can discuss how I’m absolutely not going to be a Sith floating in a tube_ **_later._ **

_But with your temperament you’d be such a powerful Sith._

Kylo Ren is _teasing_ him. Ren’s mind bubbles with amusement at Hux’s outrage. Hux had almost forgotten the emotional whiplash of having Ren in his head. Just seconds ago he’d been screaming bloody murder while carrying out bloody murder in a public spaceport, blood and rage boiling over into Hux’s mind.

Ren picks up the thought. Hux feels him roll his eyes.

_It’s fine now. You’re fine._

_That’s debatable,_ Hux says and initiates takeoff.

There are no authorities to speak of in this system. That’s one of the main reasons they’d chosen to stop here. No one follows them up out of the gravity well. Ren throws himself back into the pilot seat as they wait for the jump calculations to run.

 _Our navigation system is absurd. If you won’t help me make upgrades, then at least help me get control of the renegade droid_ **_you_ ** _decided to bring onboard._

_I didn’t pick it out. I just had the shop send their best maintenance droid._

_And I’m guessing you didn’t pay them._

_Why would I? Their minds were weak. And as you said it was nothing you couldn’t handle. Show me what you did._

Hux really wishes he could massage his temples. Or perhaps take a painkiller. His head is throbbing in time to his heartbeat. It’s unpleasant. Ren’s mind folds around him like warm fingers, soothing the throb into the background, letting Ren’s body come to the fore. He’s relaxed with the loose-limbed satisfaction of a good workout and covered in cooling sweat.

_Show me._

_Only if you show me where_ **_you’ve_ ** _been._

Ren thinks of an abandoned factory building, plascrete floor dusty and strewn with fallen roof tiles. Ren doing push ups, running through saber drills. He uses the Force to keep a rusted tank from falling apart as he slices it into tiny pieces. He methodically shatters all of the archaic glass windows using only his mind. Then, meditation. Hux suddenly invading his calm, unexpectedly strong. His flash of worry and pride and then anger when he realized he himself had put Hux in danger.

Hux thinks of the grinding boredom of the last few days. He thinks of the bliss and frustration of being left alone and helpless, a chunk of meat floating in a tube with nothing but the Upsilon’s computer systems for company, defense or entertainment. He thinks of the droid arriving, how he’d been too eager for the freedom it represented. He’d been incautious. Then, the outrage and violation of it trying to take him over, to steal the only things of himself he had left. The sharp spike of anger that severed its connection. The fierce satisfaction of gunning the interlopers down.

 _Hux,_ Ren murmurs into his mind. He feels something brush his face, a movement in the fluid that pushes his hair off his forehead. _You are strong with the Force. You are far from helpless._ _Let me teach you._

Ren is giddily excited to have a student. To have _someone like him_ , Hux realizes. Ren pauses, slightly embarrassed that Hux has plucked this emotion in particular out of his head. But then, in a reckless rush he tears open his loneliness and exposes it: the fear of his parents, the distrust of the Jedi, the cold, expectant masks of the Rens, and, harder to please but much more important than any of them, Snoke. Almost involuntarily Hux remembers in return: terrifying interviews with his father, the cutthroat competition and harsh discipline of the academy, the solitude of his rise to command.

Now, they’re both embarrassed, both vulnerable. Hux is desperately tired of feeling vulnerable.

_Hux. I have never shared thoughts so painlessly as I can with you. This is your strength with the Force, not mine. It is the Force, not the neural interface, that lets you feel the ship as your body. You showed me the winds far more vividly than I have ever been able to see them. You’ve displayed exceptional resistance to my attempts to break your shielding. You will be able to do much with this strength. I will teach you. You will not be helpless._

Hux’s head throbs distantly. Ren’s mind glows around him, a pleasant heat of triumph, anticipation. Lust, even, though it’s not like the lust that occasionally burst through their moments of heightened emotion back on Starkiller base. A lust for power, perhaps.

He supposes there is little point in arguing, now.

 

\- - - -

 

Ren insists that Hux practice using the Force on their renegade WED-15. Hux argues that he doesn’t want it damaged any further. It will already be a pain to repair its broken interface jack, and there’s too much work to be done on the shuttle to delay.

Ren threatens to break it further. Hux makes an actual, studied attempt to disconnect the droid’s power source from the rest of its systems, feeling his way down into the circuits.

He is not able to move what he thinks is the necessary wire. It may or may not exist, even. Without a schematic, it’s hard to know if what he thinks he’s sensing is accurate. Ren, frustrated, levitates the entire droid and begins to squeeze.

Hux stops him. Hux slams a wall around Ren’s mind and the droid drops to the floor, whirring pathetically on its side. Ren tears through the block immediately, but he’s delighted to have provoked such a reaction.

Ren wants to kiss him. Hux chides him for potential damage to his droid through the memory of Ren biting his neck in the fresher. It’s tempting to let himself get distracted, but there is work to do.

In the end, he isn’t able to sever the power connection on his own. It is only with Ren in his mind, pushing the Force slowly and deliberately that they finally shut it down.

They swap the WED’s personality chip with the First Order-loyal one from the ruined navdroid. Hux refuses further Force practice, citing his headache. Ren insists he should meditate. Hux insists he should fix the fucking nav system so they’re not wasting hours waiting for the hyperjump calculations.

Luckily most of the WED’s actual maintenance-related programming is still intact. It’s even able to repair its own broken jack with an assist from the medidroid’s manipulators. Hux crashes partway through the work of patching the navdroid’s mainframe into the shipboard computer. When he wakes up, Ren is sitting cross-legged  in the tangle of wire and circuit boards, eyes closed. The WED has finished soldering all the connections Hux indicated and a few he did not. Ren must have taken up the job. The hardware is now all patched in and ready to be accessed.

Hux passes a light touch across the surface of Ren’s mind. A door opens and he steps through into a memory of Ren’s meditation chamber onboard the _Finalizer._ Hux has been in this room only once, in the aftermath of the destruction of Starkiller base. Then, as now, Ren is seated on a backless chair facing the mask of Darth Vader. Then, he had been hunched in on himself, nursing a half-healed injury and a devastating sense of failure. The room had had a deep and eerie silence to it; the living hum of the _Finalizer_ could not infiltrate there. Now, Ren sits straight backed but relaxed. The room is brimful of purpose and anticipation, pulsing, breathing. The mask still feels empty but that emptiness is a potentiality, not a judgement.

_Thank you for finishing the with the navdroid._

_The WED did most of it. It just needed prompting. And you needed rest so we can continue your training._

Ren looks up at him, his mask suddenly gone. He’s smiling. The entire room seems too warm. The black walls feel enclosing, safe.

 _I’m going to finish up the navigation system before we train any more,_ Hux says. _You need to eat something, I assume. We’ll begin in two hours._

Hux walks back out the door and into his mental image of the flight simulator. He wills his heart to slow. They were not alone in there.

 _The Force was with us,_ Ren says, close behind him. The image of the flight simulator is piecemeal and loose, neither large or small, lit only by the screens and consoles Hux happens to be concentrating on. The sudden sense of his body, of Ren draping himself across Hux’s back, makes him jump.

 _Let me watch you work,_ Ren says.

_Do I have a choice?_

_No. I showed you my meditation chamber. I want to see you in yours._

Hux feels lips on the back of his neck. He feels the same sense of cottony-dark enclosure.

_Only if you stop that. It’s annoying._

_Your annoyance is habit. You are annoyed to distract yourself from a more honest response._

_And you have somehow stolen the real Kylo Ren and replaced him with a contented doppelganger._

Ren, as intended, finds this an insult. Echoing space opens up between them.

_Another misdirection. Is it your intention to start a fight?  Even when you are in every way disadvantaged?_

Of course Ren would stick his fingers right into any open wound Hux showed him. At least his viciousness is predictable. Hux imagines the nav system on one screen and the newly accessible memory banks of the droid on the other.

_It is my intention to get some actual, practical work done. If you’re quite done being inappropriately affectionate I’d like to get on with it._

_How is it inappropriate here, in the privacy of your own mind? That’s somehow less appropriate than fucking me senseless on a conference room table?_

_The situation has changed._

_The situation is always changing. Your training cannot be successful unless you allow yourself to feel._

Two things about this are insufferable. First, all the mysticism and philosophy and emotion clouding the straightforward task of using the Force. Second, Ren dancing in circles around his own feelings while accusing Hux of being repressed.

_You’re the one acting like there’s some kind of emotional attachment between us, Ren._

_And you are pretending there is not despite all evidence to the contrary including your own admission. And you pride yourself so on your empirical methods._

**_What_ ** _admission?_

_You hate me. You have said so many times. And I hate you in return._

The darkness has drawn close again, like a soft blanket. Ren’s lips are warm behind his ear.

_SINCE WHEN IS HATING SOMEONE EXPRESSED BY KISSING THEIR NECK UNINVITED?_

_If this were anything but hate the Light would tear at me. The Force cannot lie._

Hux can’t take any more of this. He opens his eyes. The common room looks distorted, blue tinted and blurred outside the tube. He’s still drowning. He has been for eleven standard days and eight hours.

 _Snoke put us in this situation to suffer,_ Hux says. _After you make your magic crystal, you will return to him. How do you think he’ll react when he doesn’t find us suffering as intended?_

 _When I complete my training, I will have proven myself. He will have_ **_no reason_ ** _to take away what is_ **_mine._ **

_If he attempted to kill me, would you stop him?_ **_Could_ ** _you actually stop him, Ren?_

_That won’t be necessary. He will see that you are a valuable asset. Loyal to the cause. Strong with the Force. Perhaps we could initiate you as a Ren._

_I would never join your mystical order, even if I had a body to join it with. Snoke will_ **_not_ ** _tolerate  an outside force tampering with his hold over you. He’s going to kill me. Or worse._

_That won’t happen. You don’t know him._

Now, finally, they are back on familiar footing. Ren is angry. Hux is angry. The nav system is still not fixed, tortuously working its way through yet another set of jump calculations.

 _I’ve been doomed since I first time I let you touch me,_ Hux says.

 ** _You_ ** _grabbed_ **_my_ ** _dick first._

 Y ** _ou_ ** _pinned me to a wall and didn’t know what to do with me. Even my patience has a breaking point._

What Hux remembers most is the helmet, large and awkward against his shoulder, Ren’s breath sobbing through the vocoder. Ren had shuddered against him and come in his robes. Hux had had to wrap his own hand around Ren’s, to finish himself off. It was the worst handjob he’d gotten since the pubescent fumblings of his Academy days. But it was saved by the thought that he might finally have a hook in Kylo Ren, a weak spot to lean his weight on.

It had been another month before he’d even seen Ren’s face. He’d been annoyed, at the time, to find Ren physically attractive.

 _I could make it much better for you, now._ Ren says. _Let me._  

 _I’m working._ Hux tells him. But it’s so natural, now, after so many, many times, to let their argument slide sideways into sexuality: Ren pinning Hux to the wall. Hux stealing away Ren’s control until he’s leaning his full weight against Hux’s chest, helpless and shuddering.

  
Kylo Ren _is_ a habit, a terrible one. But Hux can’t reboot the nav system right now anyway. Not without resetting this whole calculation.


	4. Chapter 4

Kylo Ren was always needy in bed, demanding and inconsiderate. But that night he’d lacked his usual edge of haste and frustration. He’d been subdued, almost. Distant. And Hux had been feeling magnanimous, drunk on success. After years of work, the Starkiller weapon was finally ready to fire. He only needed the orders. It was the culmination of his entire career, of everything he’d shaped his life for and around. His impending triumph made him feel indulgent. Ren’s distraction was not acceptable and so, with measured deliberation, he had made sure Ren had no thoughts left in his head that were not about Hux himself.

After, because Hux could be a generous man when it suited him, he’d kept Ren close. He let Ren’s head stay pillowed on his chest and Ren’s arms tighten around him and he’d resolutely ignoring the trickle of dread Ren was leaking into his brain. He’d carded his fingers over and over through Ren’s hair and thought about his speech and the cause and their inevitable victory until they both fell asleep.

It had been the only time they’d ever spent any amount of time touching after sex.

That is the memory they drift into, in the rest period before they reach Tatooine, but their roles are reversed. Ren’s mind spins with excitement and impending triumph as he toys with the sparse curls on Hux’s chest. Hux cards fingers through Ren’s hair over and over and tries to shove the weight of his dread down deep, surround it with walls and shields and treacherous asteroid fields.

Both of them know that tomorrow things will change. Hux does not need the Force to foresee the consequences. Neither the Force nor logical persuasion nor the power of shared fantasy have helped him change Ren’s mind about Snoke.

Tomorrow everything will be different and Hux does his damnedest to not imagine how. Instead he lets Ren’s vision of it play over his mind like a corrupted holo: flicker-flashes of desert, of heat, of some communion that Hux can’t and doesn’t want to understand.

He cards his imaginary fingers through the memory of Ren’s hair and tries not to think beyond that.

They are low on fuel when they arrive at Tattoine, but Ren insists that they go directly to Kenobi’s house. It is a ruin, sand drifted high into the front room, furnishings long stripped out by scavengers. Ren blasts a pile of fallen adobe away with a thought, exposing stairs down into a basement.

The workshop down there is much more intact, eerily so. There is a feeling inside which raises the hairs on Ren’s arms. It is not unlike the feeling which disturbed Hux in the vision of Ren’s meditation chamber, a sense of being watched by something unnamable and unknowable. Hux wonders how it compares to the atmosphere of the Sith shrine. He had only seen its interior through the optics of his droids.

Ren says, _That place was entirely Dark, buried and secret. A place where millennia of Sith cached scraps of power, until the mass of all that Force underwent a gravitational collapse. This place is the opposite. A bloated old star, nearly done consuming itself. It will not take much to make it supernova. Another black hole is the natural result._

_Your metaphor tells me nothing real about the situation._

Hux does not say that the pressure of that gaze is as oppressive, as real as the heat of the suns on Ren’s dark clothing. Ren knows.

The geological compressor is a small thing, unassuming. One might have mistaken it for some other kind of pressurized vessel. Like the rest of the work benches and racks of tools, it is furred with dust but in remarkable condition otherwise. It doesn’t start until they siphon the bad fuel out of it and replace it with a measured amount from the Upsilon’s fuel reserve. Hux is left with just enough to make it to the spaceport in Mos Eisley.

Ren can’t be bothered with details like fuel or food or water. He gathers up Vader’s precious helmet in a whirl of dark robes. He does take a moment to paw at the tube in the common room. Hux feels a phantom touch stir his hair and yanks sharply on Ren’s in return. Ren grins and throws the memory of a frantic, biting kiss at him and then he’s striding down the ramp and gone. Hux rolls his eyes and has the droids leave a stack of ration bars and potable water at the foot of the basement stairs.

Mos Eisley could be any of the dust-choked little space ports they’ve stopped at on their tour of the Outer Rim. Hux has gotten the trick of making himself unremarkable. Most creatures’ minds are lazy; it takes just a subtle, easy push to stay unnoticed. He pays for fuel and supplies with the small store of credits he and Ren have appropriated in their travels. Hux never got the hang of suggestion. He managed it once when the target was close enough for him to employ his exterior speakers. Ren’s nonsense suggestions about oratory didn’t help. But Hux had been quite adept at using the don’t-notice-me field to conceal Ren’s cheating from casino guards, provided Ren didn’t let Hux slip out his mind and fall back into the ship.

Somewhere, Ren is probably meditating already. Hux almost thinks he can hear it, like the subliminal hum of a ship’s engines through the deck plating. But it is very likely his imagination. Ren is the only Force presence strong enough for him to sense outside of the shuttle’s immediate vicinity but even he isn’t strong enough to affect Hux from half a planet away.

He thinks, briefly, about Ren’s metaphor of the Force as stars, black holes. It seems true that whatever the Force is can be converted into energy - there is no other sensible explanation for the various effects it has on people and the environment. Does that mean that matter also can be converted to Force, and vice versa?

He has the WED retrieve Ren’s cracked and discarded crystals from under the common room bench. They rings in the Force like dissonant wind chimes, trembling under Hux’s attention. He has the droid wrap them in a bit of shock-absorbing foam, resolving to study them further later. He’d rejected Ren’s suggestion that Hux make himself a crystal. He doesn’t regret it. What use could he possibly have for such a thing?  The idea of kyber crystal laser cannons holds an appeal and designing one small enough for the Upsilon would be an amusing challenge. But who would fabricate and install them for him?

He will not survive their return to Snoke. Hux knows this. He will not be allowed to continue flying Ren around the galaxy, no matter how degrading and inhumane that is, because Snoke will know that he’s been something other than entirely and perfectly miserable.

Hux has already made this choice once, though at the time he’d told himself it was a choice between his own life and his loyalty to the First Order. He’d chosen loyalty, had delivered Kylo Ren into Snoke’s hands knowing that his own survival was entirely dependant on Snoke’s whim.

Now, the same decision again. And this time he comes to it with his loyalty to Snoke and the Order broken like a bone, like a rib shattered and grinding against his internal organs. It is the thought of Kylo Ren that makes him hesitate. Ren who is such a mess without him, storming around breaking things when Snoke pulls his strings. Breaking himself open to show Hux his childish pains. Breaking himself for Snoke’s amusement, and then falling prostrate for a few words of empty praise.

Hux has tried his hardest not to acknowledge that this decision was looming. Now, with Ren far away and thoroughly distracted, the choice is obvious.

He has the WED carefully cut open the one system on the shuttle he hasn’t gone over and modified to his own satisfaction, yet: his own life support system, a self-contained unit in the base of his tube. If Hux had designed this, he would have put some kind of tamper-proofing on the tube itself. But there is no explosion, no sudden shut down of his artificial organs. Hux supposes that is a relief.

With some careful coaxing and a couple of very, very cautious prods of the Force, Hux and the WED manage to extract the tracker from the coils of his artificial digestive tract. He has the droid secret it in a landspeeder parked by the neighboring cantina.

He needs to find a biomed engineer who can maintain this for him. Or, preferably, obtain the knowledge and raw materials needed to maintain himself. There are several tanks of fluid in there, some more full than others. There’s no obvious access to any of them and no labels, of course. Hux shivers and has the WED tack the front panel back in place.

He has never been so thoroughly trapped and so terrifyingly free, both at once. He is not who he once was. He’s leaving.

He thinks of Ren again, who is somewhere sitting in a dusty cave, his mind full of nothing but his own obsessions. He trusts Hux to come back.

He really should have seen this coming, though. Hux has spend their entire trip hinting and then outright stating that they can’t go back to Snoke. If Ren didn’t see this coming, the Force must not be so strong with him after all.

Hux lifts off from Mos Eisley in the hour just before dawn. He settles into an outward-bound orbit and starts the navcomp calculating a course. He’s picked out a place to lay low and plan, an uninhabited and unremarkable midsized star a small way out into Wild Space. The course skirts a magnetar which will disrupt his hyperdrive trail should anyone try to follow him.

He’ll start the hyperdrive the moment the calculations complete. He won’t hesitate. He watches the time tick down in the safe confines of his flight simulator and doesn’t think about Ren draped across his back as he flies.

The calculations are 85 percent complete when he feels a tickle far on the edge of his consciousness. He doesn’t know exactly what it is, only that it’s a strong, foreign presence in the Force. He checks his camera feeds, brings up the Upsilon’s long-range scanners. There, far off around the curve of a planet, a ship has just exited hyperspace. It’s a nondescript Corellian light freighter, a model that was antique even before the Empire fell.

Someone on that ship is looking for Kylo Ren but, more importantly, already knows where to find him. There is intent. There is power and anger so faint at this distance that it’s more than likely his imagination.

Hux thinks he recognizes that ship.

He plots a course to intercept

  


\- - - -

 

Hux comes in high and dives down out of the suns. The Corellian freighter is resting on the bluff top by Kenobi’s house. With his long-range cameras, Hux can see the purple arc of Ren's saber, flashing and crossing against a pale yellow double blade. Blue blaster bolts hang suspended in the air. Occasionally Ren lets one go and forces his opponents to dodge out of its way. 

It _is_ them. Those meddling children who managed to destroy Hux's greatest achievement. Who left Ren slashed open and bleeding on a dying planet. The scavenger, the traitor, and the resistance pilot.

Hux dives, screaming out of the suns. Like the charge building between the ground and a thunder head, Hux strains his mind down and feels Ren's towering anger reach for him.

**Hux!**

**KILL HER.**

Hux strafes the freighter and sends the traitor diving for cover. He pours laser fire over the scavenger girl only to have her leap out of the way. He can feel her presence in the Force, a supernova of white light to Ren's dark, hot smolder. She is angry.

Ren unleashes a flurry of slashes, driving her back toward the edge of the bluff. And then Hux is pulling up, the connection to Ren's bloodlust stretching with distance. Below, the freighter leaps off the ground.

Hux flies into the suns. He's run in-atmo ship-to-ship battle sims before, but mostly in TIEs. The Upsilon was designed for surveillance and transport, not dogfighting. But this is his chance to punish these children for ruining his career, his entire life. It's their fault he's stuck in a tube with Kylo Ren dragging him towards inevitable death instead of commanding his ship, his base, his superweapon.

He lets the Upsilon stall and flips it into a vertical dive, peppering the freighter with blaster bolts. It takes a couple of superficial hits and slips sideways out of his path. Below, Ren's battle lust lashes against the girl’s righteous anger.  By the time Hux levels out, the freighter is on his tail, blaster fire slamming against his deflector shields.

He can feel them in there, the pilot and the traitor. He can feel the reaching tendrils of their minds trying to grab at him, to anticipate his moves. He can feel them entwined with each other, unconsciously knowing each other. They are dangerous together.

He has to keep them away from Ren while he finishes the girl.

The bluff is part of a complex of tablelands. Hux dives into the canyons between them with his throttle pegged to maximum. He trusts the feel of the air, can already see the entire path through the maze sure and familiar. He skims along the cliff faces, weaving to confound their aim. He would fail this simulation on points, ignoring all sorts of warnings from the system. Hull stress is over safety limits, the stabilizer joints are straining. He's violated safe proximity five separate times dodging through the rocks and still hasn’t shaken that ancient junk heap chasing him. The pilot and the traitor unconsciously cling to him in the Force, ghostly fingers slipping and returning. Hux can hear them almost, like voices muffled through a wall. But he’s too engaged in this idiotically risky flying to push them away. There’s nowhere to set down and hide.

They clear the bluffs intact and scream back out over the dunes. Hux catches a thermal, hoping the wind canl help his speed. FN-2187 is on the freighter's gun turret. He's scored a few hits, though so far Hux's shields have held. Hux spares half a thought to his own guns, and manages just enough pulse fire to make them back off.

Ren. He needs to go to Ren. Something is going to happen and he need to be there. He heels around in a loop so tight it makes the fluid in his tank slosh and darts back towards the bluffs. His pot shots at the freighter go wide. He can't shake them in atmo.

Hux knows what's going to happen and is therefore already incensed when Kylo Ren flings himself and the girl off the cliff. Hux is, of course, going to catch him. That's why he's here. He and Ren both felt the right moment to jump and Ren executed it perfectly, but that's not the point. The point is that flinging yourself off a cliff onto a moving spacecraft is idiotic, melodramatic and unnecessary in the extreme.

Hux drops the shields at the last possible moment and in that moment the traitor scores a glancing hit on his starboard engine.

The girl is supposed to be in Ren’s grasp when he lands on shuttle, unconscious preferably. But he hasn’t managed to chip through her formidable rage.  Another, secondary, point: Ren should have just killed her when Hux told him to. She doesn’t want to be his student. Her Force-shaking, righteous anger makes that very clear.

She kicks free of him in the air. Ren manages to flop onto the roof of the Upsilon and grab hold. She impacts the starboard stabilizer with her upper body. The end of her staff tears a huge gash in it, pulled by her momentum. It hurts, Hux’s mind whiting out with the memory of his last lightsaber injury.

 **_DON'T TOUCH HIM,_ ** Ren screams and _shoves_ and then she falling free. Hux misses her with the shields as he reactivates them. He hopes, viciously, that she will splatter on the rocks below. But the freighter is still right behind him, the traitor and the pilot reaching out with their spindly web of Force. It closes around her and the freighter is in just the right place at the right speed and angle and she is caught and saved. 

There is a frisson as she lands, that insubstantial light weaving around her like armor.

They are even more dangerous, all three together. And two of them don’t even realize what they’re doing.

Ren shrieks with frustration: **_DIE._ **

_Ren! We've got to get out of atmo before the engine fails or we won’t be able to shake them. Get the hell in here and_ **_shoot_ ** _them for me!_

In the time it takes Ren to open the secondary hatch and tumble through it, Hux already has them climbing through the high, thin clouds. The navdroid’s processors help him compensate for the asymmetry of the damaged engine and stabilizer. He’s pushing the shuttle as hard as he can, at risk of further deterioration. If he can just get them into space, they won't have to deal with air dragging on those stupid stabilizers.

Ren flings himself into the co-pilot’s seat and fumbles for the weapons controls.  The _Millennium Falcon_ (Ren snarls the name into Hux’s mind in a wash of injured anger at his father and the girl) is still following them. It’s been lagging behind, regrouping, but now is gaining steadily on their position. Even without the damage to his engine, the freighter is faster than the Upsilon. Its hyperdrive is likely better than theirs also. But as long as they don’t have hyperdrive tracking capabilities (it doesn’t, Ren snarls, as if he’d know), they could just jump to another system to escape if necessary. Hux restarts the nav system calculations for his interrupted jump with the part of his mind not tangled in Ren’s battle frenzy. 

_Starboard engine is at forty percent and dropping. Don’t shoot until they’re actually in range, Ren._

Ren is not very coherent, a mindless loop of _thief, pretender, traitor, she_ ** _HURT_** _you, you’re_ **_mine_** _._ It’s a drag on Hux’s thoughts as he scrambles for some semblance of a strategy. He feels unpleasantly out of control. The shuttle pitches through the upper levels of the atmosphere.  

Hux wishes he could lay a hand on Ren, physically, somehow. As if doing so might right his balance before he tips them both over. Ren isn’t _listening_ to him, wasting charge on blaster fire that falls far short of target.  

He tries it. He imagines the cockpit. Imagines himself wrapping his hands around Ren’s on the controls, braced against his back, chin hooked over his shoulder, just as he could feel Ren flying them away from the Sith shrine. He imagines the snow-laden wind of Starkiller base against Ren’s overheated chest and face, cooling Ren’s anger. Ren gasps, sucks in a desperate, deep breath. Something over Ren’s heart, tucked in his robes, gasps a breath also.

Two ships exit hyperspace above them. One looms like a crystalline thunderhead, oppressive, blinding, though to Hux’s cameras it's just a Republic MC 80 star cruiser. The other is Snoke’s flagship, the _Instituter,_ and it is a blackness beyond blackness, hungry, searching tendrils already crawling toward the edges of Hux’s mind.

They’re free into space but not far enough out of the gravity well and the nav comp is still spinning through the calculations. The ships above start disgorging X-wings and TIEs, bright shards of laser fire flashing back and forth.

A voice sounding far too much like a certain other voice Ren is not thinking about, detonates:  _**Ben.** _

And then that freighter is on them and they take evasive maneuvers. With pilot and scavenger both at the controls it’s damn impossible to outfly. The traitor blasts them again and the shields are drained enough that sliver of the energy gets through. Hux feels a branding agony. Fire warnings start screaming in the cockpit. There are X-wings approaching but not firing, intent in taking them alive. Those tendrils of lightlessness are infiltrating in through the seams in his plating, tearing into him with a Force that threatens to split his skull.

 _Get us out Hux get us out she’s here Snoke will kill her she_ **_knows_ ** _me get us out get us out!_

Ren’s mind is a smear of horror, a moon torn and crumbling between two massive gravity wells. Hux will not allow this he won’t he won’t **let** either of them have what’s **_his_ ** . The jump calculations are at 90 percent and ticking up. The _Falcon_ is being harried by TIEs now, but still pursuing them, the scavenger girl’s killing intent like breath on their neck. The Upsilon’s shields are faltering and the air of the cockpit is filling with acrid smoke and black, creeping oppression. And Hux just wants to hide them, just for a moment, just for the few seconds the navcomp needs. He wants to wrap his arms around Ren and hold him together.

The thing in the front of Ren’s robes stirs, disturbed by the pressure building there. It stirs and flares and then a spear of glass impales them both through the chest and pins them to the pilot’s seat. Suddenly they are clear as glass, as water. The hull of the shuttle has gone translucent, the stars wheeling, the movements of the ships around them slowing to a crawl that easily telegraphs the pilots’ intent. Neither Snoke’s reaching fingers nor the scavenger girl’s can touch them - they slide through and are left behind.

Ren knows exactly how if feels to be impaled. He forced himself to feel the saber pierce Han Solo, to know every second of the sparking, fading sensations that ran through his father’s brain (how dare he forgive me, how dare he blame himself for all I have achieved how did I feel nothing but hollow inside I never loved him she knows she hears she’s always listening).

 ** _Ben,_** that thunderous voice croons, wounded but still loving, as fraught with hope and despair as Ren himself is.

Ren makes a choked noise, too angry to be a sob.

The nav comp reaches one hundred percent. Hux imagines slamming the jump button.

All around and on and in the water-clear skin of Hux’s shuttle, the stars blur to streaks.


	5. Chapter 5

_Ren? What is that? How did it do that?_  

 _It’s the crystal. The new one. It was so easy, Hux, nothing like last time. Grandfather’s spirit is really with me, I can feel it._  

 _You think that was your grandfather? Who saved/hurt us?_  

 _What?  No, that was you._  

 _No._  

 _Yes._  

 **_No._**  

 **_Yes!_ ** _Which of us is the expert here?_

_You’re fumbling through just as much as I am, Ren. You’ve just been at it longer._

Hux knows this as he says it. Snoke’s lessons are few, sparse, abstract, though his punishments are always thorough. Luke Skywalker’s lessons had been watchful, delivered with a sense of holding Ren back. Hux should not have tugged this thought to the surface, but it is just another truth torn open between them. He fits his fingers along Ren’s jaw in apology.

Ren leans his cheek into Hux’s hand. The light under the lily pads is bright. Arkanis had only a handful of sunny days like this each solar cycle. Ren’s hair floats around his face, tiny bubbles caught in his eyelashes. Stripes of light waver over his pale skin. His lips twist, emotions too jumbled to settle on a single expression.

 _Where are we going?_ Ren asks.

_An uninhabited system in Wild Space. A place to hide._

_Planets?_

_Three gas giants and a handful of small rocks. One moon in the habitable zone with a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere._

Ren smiles brilliantly, leaning into Hux’s palm.

_You did want to bring me with you._

_You knew I would leave?_

_I decided it didn’t matter, since I could just come find you when I was done with my training. Better to have you acting on your instincts, your emotions._

_If the choice is between dying for your sake and betraying you to live, I will choose to live._  

_Good. As I’ve told you repeatedly, I want you alive._

Ren needs him alive, a need piercing as a glass shard through his chest. It’s an absurd, unfair desire, given Snoke, given everything about this situation. But Hux also wants to live. He wants Ren’s need of him, wants Ren’s weakness to match his own. His desire to wrap Ren up in himself and flee to the ends of the galaxy is just as absurd and unfair. 

 _I cannot betray him, Hux._  

 _We already have._  

They ran from Snoke, slithering out from between his clutching fingers. They fled a battle with General Leia Organa of the Resistance, instead of making every effort to eliminate her. They abandoned their assigned duties and Snoke apparently thought their desertion warranted his own personal presence on the far side of the galaxy to collect them. 

In the dream under the lily pads, Ren’s fingers follow the bands of light across Hux’s shoulder. 

 _I have disappointed him many times and always been forgiven._  

 _I haven’t._ Hux thinks sharply and the lines of light are shrinking and freezing down into the hard points of stars. 

Ren smells smoke. Hux increases air filtration and makes sure that the WED has taken care of the fire back in the engine compartment. He wasn’t foolish enough to touch its autonomous firefighting routines. The medidroid is applying a bacta patch to a long burn down the outside of Ren’s leg. Hux starts rebooting systems which got knocked out by their passage near the magnetar, its magnetic field so strong it even distorts hyperspace in the vicinity. 

 _Well,_ Hux says. _There is nothing good to report, save that there is a nonzero chance we‘ll survive._  

The starboard engine has failed completely, port is faltering, and several of the attitude thrusters are offline. Shields will probably come back up if needed, but certainly not at full strength. Long-range sensing systems were damaged by that gash in the stabilizer. Hull integrity deteriorated appreciably during their jump to this system; they’ll have to make repairs before they risk another. 

They are coming in at the star far more quickly than Hux is comfortable with, but with so many engines and thrusters offline there isn’t sufficient power to slow them down. Hux thinks vengefully of having the Upsilon-class redesigned from the ground up, then quashes the thought before he can get into any design specifics. It’s impossible now and he has no time for distractions. 

Ren winces in the copilot’s seat. The medidroid beeps disapprovingly. 

They will attempt gravity braking maneuvers, leveraging their reduced thrust capacity with the local gravity wells. With care, Hux can position them for a landing on the green, livable moon orbiting the system’s largest gas giant. Provided they don’t break up in the atmosphere, they should live.

Hux has every intention of living. He sets the navcomp to calculating orbital parameters. 

The thing under Ren’s robes throbs with his heartbeat. Ren pulls it out and holds it towards the cockpit camera with a watery smile. It looks more like a faceted slug of graphite than a crystal. It burns his fingers even through his gloves. 

 _You compressed Darth Vader’s helmet into_ **_that?_**  

 _It is an even more fitting, powerful reliquary this way. How long will this take?_  

 _Hours. I’d suggest sleeping in the pilot’s chair. You’ll want to be strapped in if anything goes wrong._  

Ren heaves himself to his feet and meanders back into the crew cabin. He emerges again a moment later with an armload of bunk mattresses and blankets and deposits them on the common room floor. 

 _What are you doing?_  

 _I want to sleep with you._  

 _Sentimental garbage. Your physical location is irrelevant._  

 _Maybe I just want to see you suffering in there._ Ren says, feeling absolutely nothing of the sort. 

 _Maybe I don’t want you to._  

 _Too bad._  

Ren opens a ration bar and leans against the tube, staring unrepentantly. Hux opens his eyes, the better to glare at him. The outside of the tube is smudged with fingerprints. His chest prickles with static where the crystal pierced them. 

 _You’re terrible._  

 _I hate you too, Hux._  

 _I’m going to wake you up and make you strap in when we actually maneuver._  

 _Good. You might need me._  

Hux doubts it, but knows that it’s true. 

Ren smirks.

 

\- - - -

 

The shuttle falls through the atmosphere of an unnamed moon. Hux calmly lists numbers: altitude, hull stress, seconds to impact. Hux calculates drag coefficients in the face of their combined knowledge of death and Ren clutches for enough power to slow their descent. Hux falls through the atmosphere of an unnamed moon, and Ren sinks into every atom of him, imagining him indestructible, forcing engines and deflector shields to hold long past their breaking points. 

They set down hard in a glacial valley, between cliffs which rise to the snow line. The landing gears bite deep into the gravelly soil. It takes Ren some time to unclench their mental grip. The pieces that broke off during reentry fall away from the shuttle all at once, littering the ground in a perfect halo. Hux can feel them, like a dream of seeing all his fingers cut off and still feeling the dirt under their nails. 

Hux cannot fall away from Ren’s mind so easily, not with Ren still in the shuttle, inside his body. Not with Ren shivering and exhausted, forehead pressed to the transparisteel, Force-ghost of his palm pressed to Hux’s pounding heart. They are alive somehow. Hux feels the ghost of Ren’s lips on his throat and no, unacceptable, of course Ren would ruin this moment if Hux let him. Instead of letting him Hux draws them both into a memory: Ren curled against Hux’s chest in his bunk on the Finalizer, Hux’s fingers carding through his hair. From there it’s a short and somehow bitter tumble down into sleep. 

Hux sleeps for eight and a half hours, far longer than he’s managed since this ordeal began. Longer, in fact, than he typically managed on Starkiller or the _Finalizer_. The gas giant hangs at the same place in the sky that it was when they landed; the sun has only moved a few degrees toward it. Ren is still asleep, curled in the pile of bunk mattresses on the common room floor. Hux doesn’t expect him to wake for hours more; even asleep he looks scraped thin. 

Hux runs through a systems check. Damages are extensive but less severe than Hux feared. The hyperdrive is intact, if nothing else. Hux calculates how much fuel they will need to get out of the local gravity well and jump to the closest inhabited system that’s _not_ Tatooine. Keeping that in reserve, they have enough fuel to last for roughly five standard days with Ren using systems as normal, eleven with the shuttle at minimal power, or eighteen with only his life support systems running. If they cannot repair the ship by then, they are stranded. When fuel runs out completely, life support will fail. His tube, of course, has no backup power supply. 

Hux double checks the temperature and chemical analysis of the atmosphere outside, then opens the ramp and powers down everything except his life support. 

Hux waits, suspended in a void where he can feel the needles in his skin, the burning line of the lightsaber slash, the smothering sensation of his diaphragm trying and failing to move. His damaged engines ache. His starboard stabilizer is raw and throbbing, hull plating torn away in reentry. The blown shield generators leave him naked. He can feel all of it but he can’t do anything except float in his tube and suffer. Without the computers on as interface, he can’t even communicate with his droids. Ren’s mind is a stillness curled at the foot of the tube, undreaming. 

Hux powers the shuttle back up. The chrono tells him it’s only been about ten minutes. He flips through the exterior camera feeds. The squat, bulbous trees which line the valley are unchanged. There’s no sign of life except for the cloud of insects churning over a nearby stream. 

Hux has two choices. He can fix himself or wait for death. 

He has the droids go over their inventory in case any of it was damaged in the fight with the _Millenium Falcon_ or the fire. There are emergency shelters, blankets, and gear for various weather conditions, some small arms and trooper armor. There is water but very little food. Hux left nearly all of it at Kenobi’s house and didn’t bother to purchase more in Mos Eisley. There are limited tools and spare parts. Hux augmented them during the trip but he did not anticipate damages of this magnitude. The starboard engine is all but unsalvageable. But the other, with a little creativity, should get them off this rock. Hux will need Ren’s help for some of it, especially the breaches in his hull plating. The droids are not designed to climb. 

He only has two choices. He sets the droids to work tearing fire-damaged panels and wiring out of the engine compartment. Then he takes a full system inventory and starts shutting down everything non-essential. 

Of course, all Ren can think about when he finally wakes up is the damned crystal. He complains that he can’t set it without bringing up the interior lighting. Hux throws him off the ship. 

They work. Ren leans against the landing strut, using a nearby rock as a table. The WED makes good headway on the mess of the engine compartment, the medidroid assisting with its actuators. Ren actually remembers to eat when Hux prods at the hunger he can feel nagging the edge of his mind. 

It is comfortable. Companionable, even. 

As usual, Ren ruins it. 

 _Hux!_ he calls, jittery, manic with excitement. He’s like a child on some festival day. _Hux, it’s done! You have to watch!_  

 _Do not activate that thing inside._  

 _You can see me here, right?_  

He grins up into the exterior rear cam like he’s not expecting to fail as badly as he has with the first three crystals. 

 _...Yes._  

Kylo Ren squares his shoulders and attempts to school his features into an appropriately serious expression. Hux steels himself. 

The blade is not red. It’s white. White with a core of black and a throbbing pulse of power which resonates through Hux’s deck plating. He can feel it in his flesh, in his skull, in his jaw. He can feel it even in the ghosts of his knees, hips, fingers, wrists. For a single, indrawn breath there is glassy stillwater clarity. Ren and Hux and the Upsilon, the meadow, the valley, and the snow-capped mountains know the saber as a fulcrum point and then are each themselves again. 

Ren’s gaze snaps away from the blade. It slices through the air as he whirls. Its hum has different harmonics than any of the other blades, both higher and lower at the same time. 

“Grandfather?” Ren says, reverent, breathless. He takes two shaking steps toward the stream. Hux checks all the exterior cameras on that side and sees nothing. 

 **_Ren?_**  

Hux is ignored. The more Ren stumbles away, the less Hux can feel of his mind. Hux wakes up the directional mic array and trains it on him. 

“-many years I have sought your guidance,” he’s saying. He sinks to his knees. The saber burns in his hand. 

“Yes, I know. I have not been worthy until now. I have struggled against the Light.” 

Whatever Ren’s seeing, it’s not manifesting on any spectrum Hux’s sensors can detect. Is it perhaps only in Ren’s mind?  A voice coming from the blade itself? But Ren is staring at a blank patch of grass as if there’s something there. 

 _“You_ couldn’t? So, you’re saying I’m doomed to fail?” Ren asks. Hux can hear the distress in his tone. Perhaps Hux should go back to his wiring work and leave Ren alone with this… personal crisis. He does not. 

“I don’t understand how. Grandfather. Lord Vader. Show me. Please?” 

 _“What?_ No. Impossible. Ben Solo is _dead.”_  

“Him? But he’s-” 

Ren twists around, peering over his shoulder at the shuttle. The tear tracks on his face are clear in the exterior cam. For a bare moment, Hux feels the brush of his mind, a swirl of confusion and despair. For a bare moment, Hux sees this image: a tall man, black cloaked and white robed, young and old, whole and helmeted and disfigured. 

He’s gone when Ren turns around. Ren’s wail tears at Hux. It shapes him like metal bent in a press until he almost feels he can reach out and lay hands on Ren’s shoulders. 

 **_Hux._**  

 _Ren. Come inside. And turn that thing off before you start a grass fire._  

 _I’ve failed. My training is not yet complete._  

 _But. Your crystal works? And you spoke with your Grandfather?_  

 _I failed_ **_him_ ** _Hux._  

 _So, do better. Learn from your failure and correct it._  

Ren lurches to his feet and strides away from the shuttle. Hux can feel the tension in his muscles, the wetness on his face. He is so angry at himself it is nearly intolerable. It reminds Hux sharply of waking up in the tube for the first time, panicked and overwhelmed by Ren’s mind. Every needle in his flesh burns as cold as they did before he trained himself to ignore them. 

Ren splashes through the shallow, gravel-bedded stream and stalks toward the distant trees. The pulse of the saber lingers at the edge of Hux’s mind far longer than Ren’s thoughts do. Ren isn’t paying attention to him. Hux zooms his camera in and watches Ren slice up one of the odd trees which fringe the meadow. 

The first thing he does with his all-important new lightsaber is throw a tantrum. Of course. Hux can imagine several reasons Darth Vader might be disappointed in Kylo Ren, though it’s equally likely that Ren is misinterpreting whatever was told to him. What was Ren expecting from a man who chose to recant his allegiance to the Empire? Hux has no time for this. He shuts down the exterior cameras and goes back to his engine work. 

Hux is knee deep in improving the WED’s wiring subroutines when he notices that the sun is beginning to dim. It’s sliding behind the bulk of the gas giant in what will be an hours’ long eclipse. Hux has gotten frustrated with the main engine and switched over to the easier task of the maneuvering thrusters. Most of them had their control circuits knocked out by the fire but are otherwise still functional. He’s hoping he can get the WED to autonomously lay cable while he takes a nap. 

Ren still has not returned. The chrono tells him it’s been ten standard hours. 

Hux checks his fuel reserves. They are emptying slightly more quickly than he’d calculated, but within an acceptable margin of error. He wakes up his exterior camera array. 

Ren carved a path through that strip of trees, straight away from the shuttle toward the distant wall of the valley. Hux can see the litter of hollow trunks and another silver ribbon of water before the land begins to curve upward. 

Ren is a dark speck perched on a promontory. The sides look too steep for him to have climbed on foot. Hux finds him more by feel than any kind of methodical search pattern. His exasperation is as much for Ren’s dramatic brooding as it is for the Force itself. It still irks him that something so indistinct and uncertain actually works.   

Already the bright points of the neighboring moons are visible in the sky. Hux can’t fly to catch Ren if he tumbles off a cliff in the darkness. And, of course, Ren doesn’t have a communicator on him. Hux can feel that all of their com units are still on board. 

He’s so far. There’s no way Hux could touch his mind at this distance. He tries it anyway, spinning himself out until he threatens to dissolve into the twilight. It makes him think of that spear of glass through his chest, the way they dissolved into transparent, untouchable clarity. 

Remembering shows him this possibility: the wound a window, a doorway, and the spear a bridge of glass rooted in that wound. Hux winces, sliced open by its teetering weight and then the other end is grabbed and supported. 

Ren’s mind is distracted by surprise but poised over a chasm of self-pity. Because of course this little episode is all about his deep and bleak self-pity. Ren catches Hux’s annoyance. It angers him. It would take very little effort to smash this thin bridge between them. Hux feels Ren consider it. But it’s strange. Interesting. Yet another thing Hux has done that Ren himself could not have managed. Ren is proud of him, even through his annoyance. 

 _What?_ Ren asks, the thought coalescing out of distant echoes. 

 _It’s getting dark._  

 _I’m well aware._  

 _Come back._  

 _No._  

Hux considers snapping the connection himself. He knows without knowing how that it would hurt. 

 _I saw Darth Vader too. For a moment._  

Ren manages to project both a cringe of shame and an ‘I told you so’ simultaneously. Hux will never understand how Ren tolerates such bizarre emotional states. 

 _What did he say to you?_ Hux asks. 

 _He told me that I would never defeat the Light. That he never did. That I should stop trying._  

 _Practical advice. Why waste effort on something you know is unfeasable?_  

 _You don’t understand, Hux. If I’m not a servant of the Dark, what am I? What use was any of it?_  

A flash, agonizing, of a lightsaber skimming through the flesh of a small child as she flees. Kneeling in a cold, dark room until his body is too cramped and shriveled with thirst to move. His father’s face, forgiving. 

 _I_ **_can’t_ ** _be Ben Solo and Kylo Ren at the same time. Ben Solo is_ **_dead_ ** _. I hated him, so I killed him._  

 _You expect me to have any sympathy for your identity crisis after what I’ve been through?  All my life’s work, my career, Starkiller, the future I was building for the galaxy - it’s all gone. Who am_ **_I_ ** _supposed to be, now?_  

 _You are General Hux of the First Order. Meant to command. Meant to bring order to chaos, by any means necessary. Why would that change?_  

 _It’s changed because I’m a fucking shuttle now, Ren. And you’re still exactly the same arrogant, combative child who’s made my life miserable for years. The only thing that’s actually changed about you is the way you see yourself._  

 _Enough. Leave me to meditate._  

_You mean sulk. Fine by me. I have work to do. Don’t fall down that fucking cliff._

_I won’t._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The landscape they crash in is inspired by [Sarek National Park](http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/365-photos/sarek-national-park-sweden/) in Sweden.


	6. Chapter 6

The eclipse lasts just under nine standard hours, enough time for the outside temperature to drop several degrees. Then, the sun slips from behind the gas giant and an endless midday begins.

Ren appears, a wavering shadow in the heat-haze. His mind is subdued, calmer but still nursing his wounded ego. His muscles are sore from lightsaber drills and hours of hiking. He’s using the Force to keep himself cool inside his dark robes. He’s hungry and slightly dehydrated.

 _I’m fine,_ Ren says. _Open the ramp._  

 _No. I’m trying to preserve my interior temperature. There’s water and food for you under the shuttle._  

 _I need a shower._  

 _Admirable as I would usually find that sentiment, the sonic shower consumes far more power than I’ve budgeted. Go bathe in the river._  

Hux expects Ren to argue. Instead, he removes his helmet and starts shucking out of his robes, discarding them in a trail to the water’s edge. The stream runs ankle deep and cold enough to make the bones of Ren’s feet ache. He projects the cold at Hux loudly, pointedly. He’s going to sunburn. Hux can feel the pressure of the sunlight on his skin. 

He bends and splashes water over himself, then straightens. He glares at the shuttle as glittering droplets slide down the planes of his chest. Hux returns his attention to the WED. He’s trying to repair the generator’s control circuits without losing power to the rest of the shuttle. It’s delicate work. 

Ren uses the Force to scoop up a chunk of the river bottom and turn it over onto the bank. He steps into his little bathing pool and starts running his hands over his limbs. He’s still projecting the frigid water and burning sun. He slides his fingers deliberately over a nipple. 

 _What exactly is the point of this little display, Ren?_  

Ren’s bottom lip trembles. Then, Hux is grabbed and _yanked_. 

He surfaces, his hair too long and dripping into his eyes. His hands find and brace against the heat of Ren’s chest in the swirling water. Silt squishes between his toes.   

Ren touches his cheek, trying to imagine the texture of his beard. Hux can still see him in the exterior camera, sitting alone in his little bathing hole. It’s too disorienting. His displays swim out of focus. His stomach twists. Falling against Ren’s chest, eyes closed - that helps. Ren fits their thighs together, digs fingers into Hux’s back. None of this is real. 

 _Ren. Don’t you understand how cruel this is?_  

 _Is it not also cruel to deny yourself?_  

Hux is holding on to the illusion of Ren as tightly as Ren is holding onto him. He hates this. 

 _I prefer reality._  

 _The Force is real._  

 _Do not start in with your Force-flavored solipsism. I’m far too busy to explain how illogical it is._  

 _You’re in a charming mood._  

 _When I run out of fuel, I’ll die._  

 **_WHAT?_ ** Ren bellows. His mind is suddenly invasive, digging at Hux’s thoughts for details. In the fantasy of the bathing pool, Hux shoves him away. 

 **_Stop._**  

 **_WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME SOONER?_**  

 _It would have been_ **_obvious_ ** _if you_ **_ever_ ** _spared a thought to_ **_anyone_ ** _but_ **_yourself_ ** _. I’ve made reasonable time with repairs on my own. The WED is perfectly capable of the work needed on the interior._  

 **_Let me inside!_**  

 **_No_ ** _. I haven’t budgeted enough power to run lights or environmental controls._  

 **_I don’t need them!_**  

 _You don’t need oxygen?_  

Hux doesn’t have time to waste on this argument. Ren is naked and muddy and pounding on the ramp control panel. Hux has no power going to it. If Ren attempts to open the hydraulics with the Force, he might damage them. 

 _Stop_ **_prying_ ** _at me and let me show you the plan._ Hux snaps. _We don’t even have a spare welder. There’s nothing for you to do right now._  

 _There_ **_has_ ** _to be._ **_Show me!_**  

Hux unfurls his mental timetable, fuel budget, annotated schematics. Ren’s mind skims over all of it with no real comprehension of the details. Instead, he mostly seems comforted that Hux has things under control. Ren’s faith in his abilities is would be more gratifying if Ren weren’t so irresponsible. 

 _Don’t get_ **_annoyed_ ** _with me for letting you plan everything. You’d just pick apart any plan_ **_I_ ** _came up with._  

 _That’s because your so-called plans are uniformly vague and reckless._  

 _You feel more like yourself when you’re giving orders._ Ren says. _So just tell me what to do and trust me to do it._  

Having Ren _volunteer_ to take orders does an unseemly amount to calm Hux’s nerves. Ren imagines Hux clutched to his chest again, imagines tucking his face against Hux’s shoulder. Hux’s imagines the texture of Ren’s wet hair under his hands almost automatically. 

 _I’ll be very clear when I require your assistance. Your main task will be the hull plating._ _The WED can’t reach all the breaches without you levitating it. My abilities with matter manipulation aren’t as trustworthy as yours.  I refuse to risk the only tool that can prevent my death._  

 _I won’t_ **_let_ ** _you die. I need you. Grandfather said so._  

Well, this is getting embarrassingly sentimental. Hux lets his imagined body dissipate. Ren pouts. 

 _Finish your bath and set up the emergency shelter. By my calculations we have over two standard days before sundown and it’s only going to get hotter. There’s also some water, a filtration kit, and our entire supply of rations. They should last you until it cools off, but then we’ll need to find you another food source._  

 _I can fast._  

 _Ration, don’t fast. I need you fit for duty._  

Ren wanders back to his mud-bottomed pool, picking up his robes along the way. Hux returns his attention to the WED. He ignores the ripples of feeling Ren keeps exuding into their shared mental space. Putting words to it would be unnecessary. 

With the generator wiring complete, Hux has the WED start stripping the undamaged floor plating out of the engine compartment. Hux’s durasteel flooring is the only thing he has which is suitable for repairing the hull. The droids can stack it into the airlock and Hux can cycle it once, to minimize power usage. Removing it is unpleasant, like tearing up a fresh scab. 

Ren sets up the emergency shelter, then paces around outside feeling increasingly powerless. It’s exactly the kind of mood that’s likely to make him do something stupid, unless Hux can engage him somehow. 

 _Does the Light still hurt when you don’t fight it?_ Hux asks. 

Ren hesitates. _I always fight it. It always hurts._  

 _Even when you were a Jedi?_  

 _That was different. You are still stubbornly ignorant of the Force. The Light dilutes the power of the Dark side. If I don’t fight it, I might fall the way Grandfather did._  

 _Why would Vader not want you to fall the way he did?  He betrayed the Empire for sentiment and he apparently encourages your… attachment._  

 _It’s not as simple as you presume._ Ren says. _I have been meditating on his wisdom but I still don’t understand it. I cannot go back to the Light after all I’ve done._  

A memory-flash, Ren’s: staring down at the body of a child, fallen in two pieces, the smell of cooked flesh. (His father’s hand touching his face. An emptiness where emotion should go, where the Light is a screaming echo.) The look of hate on the scavenger girl’s face as she activated her saber-staff. 

 _Are you trying to imply that the Force can somehow judge you for your past actions?_  

 _I was judged before I committed any of them. That judgement could not stop me._  

 _And yet you were indoctrinated as a Jedi, as was Darth Vader. Is all of this guilt the Jedi way?_  

 _Are you actually asking me for a philosophy lesson?_  

 _I suppose._  

Ren is inordinately pleased. He draws himself up tall and faces the camera by the ramp, so Hux can see him gesticulate. His hair is half-dry, nose and shoulders sunburned. He’s naked except for his mantle, which he’s tied around his waist like a towel. The rest of the robes are spread out to dry in the sun. 

 _The Jedi code is one of self-denial,_ Ren says. _There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. There is no passion, there is serenity. There is no chaos, there is order. There is no death, there is the Force._  

 _A terrible fit for you all around._  

 _Yes. Compare that to the Sith code, which is a mantra of personal power. Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force will set me free._  

 _It’s as if they constructed their philosophies just to excuse the millennia of war,_ Hux says. _Why are you not a Sith, again?_  

 _Because I am Ren._  

 _Which means what, exactly?_  

 _In the old days, before Snoke reformed the order, the Ren also had a mantra modeled on the Jedi code: Ignorance is knowledge. Passion is serenity. Power is submission. Freedom is the Force._  

 _And I suppose they were even more mystical and useless than the Jedi?_  

 _Both the Sith and Jedi are fundamentally self-righteous. The Ren strive to whittle away the ego until it ceases to block the flow of the Force. We negate the self rather than elevating it._  

 _And how, then, did you end up as their leader when you’re so blatantly egotistical?_  

 _Snoke leads the order. The Master of Knights is chosen via ceremonial combat. I won the tournament and so the honor is mine. But my primary purpose now is to pursue my training._  

 _I have several opinions about your training. But I’m sure, given my mystical ignorance, that they will be summarily ignored.  If you won't listen to Darth Vader when he tells you to stop causing yourself unnecessary pain, I suppose there’s no point in me telling you the same._  

This provokes a queasy ache of sentiment from Ren. Hux consults his fuel reserve sensor and feeds the numbers back into his new power budgeting subroutine. He changes the subject. 

 _You thought of that scavenger girl. She seemed awfully passionate about killing you, for a Jedi. I don’t suppose she failed to find Luke Skywalker._  

Ren winces. 

 _Skywalker told her what I did. That’s why she wanted to kill me. That and Han Solo. Skywalker is already failing at her training, allowing her to act on such hate._  

 _You think you could do better._  

 _She has far more Dark in her than she knows. Skywalker will only stunt her abilities._  

Hux doesn’t like the idea of the girl dogging Ren’s heels, apprenticing. Ren grins, savoring his jealousy. 

 _So, which am I, then? Light or Dark?_ Hux asks. 

 _Dark in your anger, in your lust for power and your lack of remorse. Light in your clarity of mind and discipline, your desire for order._  

 _If I can be both Light and Dark, why can’t you?_  

 _Your clinging to control is the obstacle the Light sets in your path to power. The Force cannot flow freely with such a block._  

 _I don’t want the Force to flow freely. I want to direct it to my purposes. You can’t just throw a turbine into a steam-filled room and hope for the best._  

One of the most irritating things about the Force is the way it engenders metaphor. But something about the turn of phrase twigs Ren’s imagination. He peers closer at the thought, skimming the underlying framework of mechanics, fluid dynamics, kinetic and potential energy. Hux is gratified that he’s not entirely ignorant of basic physics. 

 _I’ll have you know that I was a reasonably good student. When I felt like it._  

 _I’m sure it was your attention span that was the issue._  

 _Yes,_ Ren lies and feels, again, that smallness, that fear and aloneness that he has spent so long trying to kill. Hux bats the feeling aside, dismisses his own memory of waiting at attention outside his father’s office. As Hux has grown into the shape of the Upsilon, he’s also grown around the shape of Ren’s mind. Ren fits there like a TIE fighter sliding into its docking cradle. These memories of isolation are no longer helpful or relevant. 

The wound in his chest is a window, a still pool, and the wound on Ren is an answering stillness. 

 _Grandfather also told me I should listen to you._  

 _Perhaps his advice_ **_is_ ** _worthwhile, then,_ Hux says, and has the WED start ripping up the deck in the crew quarters.

 

_\- - - -_

 

The sun crawls down the western sky for nearly fifty hours before it touches the horizon. The trees at the edge of the valley contract their leaves into needles, exposing their green, bulging trunks. The stream swells with melt from the glacier at the head of the valley. A whirl of current rips through Ren’s bathing pool, carving into the stream bank. 

Ren refuses to stay in the shelter or even the shade. Rather than let him wander off again, Hux  has him patch the hull in the blazing afternoon sun. Frequent breaks are needed to keep the heat of welding from further damaging any of the instruments or wiring underneath. The WED was designed to operate in extreme conditions, but it is not a new droid. Hux keeps a wary eye on its readouts. 

Ren, it turns out, is perfectly capable of shielding himself from the sun, levitating a small droid and Force-bending two centimeter thick durasteel all at once. And yet he insists that Hux waste time ‘helping’ keep him cool. Hux simply can’t grab hold of all that chaos the way Ren can. The air, the photons reflecting in all directions, the radiant heat of the hull which Ren can feel through the soles of his boots - Hux can see/feel them perfectly but they slip and run through his fingers. It is, as Ren points out, impossible to control each molecule individually but Hux can’t seem to stop himself from trying. He gets frustrated. They yell. Ren offers him a sexual fantasy as a combination bribe and distraction. Hux feels only marginally better after a post-coital nap. 

There is not much comfort in fantasy and no time to waste. Ren and the WED make slow progress on the hull. Without a supply of sealant, the patches have less integrity than Hux would prefer. They’ll need to keep the upper stabilizers retracted, but half the sensor arrays in them are unrepairable anyway. 

Sunset itself takes hours and then there is only the roseate light reflected from the gas giant. Thunderstorms sweep down the valley, blown on cool winds. It is just as difficult to make a rain shield of Force as it is to make a heat shield. Ren sprawls on his back on the stabilizer, lets the rain hit his skin, stops it just a centimeter before the partly-closed hull breach beside him. Hux tugs gently on Ren’s hair, attempts to brush the drops of water off his cheek. The Force moves easily enough when he can imagine his own hands doing the moving. Ren sighs and turns his face into the touch. 

When rations run out, Ren is forced to hunt and gather.  He teaches Hux how to gauge the toxicity of a substance using the Force. Hux is much better at magical chemical analysis than he is at telekinesis of any sort, especially once he ignores Ren’s advice about trying to smell things with his brain. The gracile herding quadrupeds which roam the valley aren’t particularly exotic on a molecular level. Ren claims they taste like nerf. The green-trunked trees are full of viscous resin but it is much too flammable to be useful to them. They burn blue-green in Ren’s campfire. 

The exterior temperature falls until Ren is bundled up in all of his robes, using the Force to stay warm rather than cool. Their first test firing of the port engine fails, but reveals a previously undetected coolant leak. They manage to glean some coolant from the inoperable starboard engine, but the total amount of coolant available to the system is far below spec. Ren nearly loses a finger trying to re-seat the starboard stabilizer. Hux feels the slippage in the joint, sees with perfect prescience how it will catch Ren’s hand. Adrenaline lets him yank Ren bodily away. Ren is unperturbed but the incident leaves Hux rattled and with a pounding headache. 

Hux’s fuel readouts tick down slowly, inexorably. They are rapidly approaching the point where they will have to attempt a takeoff or be stranded. 

 _Absolutely not,_ Hux says. _I’ll return for you when I’m in full operating condition and well supplied. This is the only plan that makes sense, Ren._  

He lobs a fist-sized rock at Ren, who spins it in with the other three orbiting his head. Ren pouts at the space where Hux is pretending to stand. 

 _You can’t_ **_leave_ ** _me here._  

 _I will_ **_not_ ** _have you with me if I break up in the atmosphere._  

 _We won’t. I used the Force when we landed. I can do it again taking off. You don’t have the strength to do_ **_that_ ** _alone._  

Hux catches the rock as Ren tosses it back. The more vividly he imagines its heft and texture, the easier this is. 

 _And if there_ **_is_ ** _a hull breach on takeoff, what then? You’re planning to just stay awake holding me together until we reach the next system? Do you have any idea the kind of stress that hyperspace travel puts on a ship’s structure?_  

 _I’m strong enough. We’re strong together._ _I_ ** _will not_** _allow you to leave without me._  

Hux tosses the rock from one palm to another. He tries to forget that his hands are not actually there. _I’ll come back. I will._  

 _Not if you break up in the atmosphere._  

 _My chances are better if I don’t have to worry about keeping out vacuum. I wouldn't have to power any of the lights or environmental systems. Do you have any idea how much power the gravity generator uses?_  

Ren rolls his eyes. _I don’t need gravity._  

 _I refuse to watch you freeze or suffocate or get crushed by G-forces when I could have prevented it._  

 _If you’re so unsure of your abilities, maybe we should just send up a distress beacon._  

 _Really? You want to start that argument again? If you’re so set on running back to Snoke, maybe I_ **_should_ ** _send up a distress beacon when I leave. Let_ **_him_ ** _come find you._  

 _You’re capable of more than you think. Catch._  

What Ren tosses him is not a rock but a fist-sized globe of water. In it, Hux can see Ren, miniature and inverted. Then it occurs to him that his hand is imaginary and the globe of water is not solid or contained in any way. It falls through his palm and splatters into the frost-furred grass. 

 **_Hux,_ ** Ren says, and it is a caress, it is a plea, it is a lightning rod of _need_ suddenly exposed which Hux can’t help but ground himself to. Hux needs him too, frustratingly, desperately. The ways they need each other are too different, too incompatible, and the spark gap between them causes them nothing but pain. Ren’s eyes are wild as he catches that current. He steps the voltage up higher and higher until the potential feels impossible to contain. Klicks up the valley, the rocky promontory Ren likes to brood on pulls up by its roots. Ren flips it over as easily as he flipped the square meter of river bed and lets it fall.   

For a moment they are poised silent and dream-like on that water-clear fulcrum. Then, a clattering roar rolls over them, the sound of the distant hill slumping into rubble. It echoes in the empty sky and the empty, metallic spaces of Hux that Ren fits into. 

Ren laughs, triumphant, and Hux _aches_. He doesn’t know how to put words to this feeling, this piece of himself that Ren has burned open. All he can do is let Ren sweep him into his arms, feeling static snap and dissipate between them. That current of need wanes, but, terrifyingly, doesn’t close up entirely. This isn’t real. This isn’t real, except that Ren forces it to be real. 

Cold, ashy fingers claw their way out of Ren’s hindbrain, groping into the join between their minds. They seek out the charge between them, tasting it, gouging and prying in search of more. 

Ren knows this touch. They both do.Snoke.

 Ren shoves Hux away and his imagined body disintegrates. He drowns for only a moment, trying to scrape his mind clean of Snoke’s oily residue, and then he’s back in the shuttle. Hux begins booting systems and frantically shoving figures into the astronav system. The engine casing is still off the port engine, their supplies scattered around Ren’s camp, the WED still outside. They are at least half an hour from even an unsafe takeoff. 

Over on the stream bank, Ren’s presence is a smooth, blank wall. It makes Hux sick and furious to imagine Ren in there with Snoke, allowing himself to be _infiltrated_. The moment that shell breaks, Hux rushes in, incautious, desperate to wipe that ashy uncleanness out of Ren’s mind. He’s completely unprepared for the bright knife of pride Ren feels, a child running home to his parent with perfect marks in hand. 

 _He’s coming to get us. He felt our power from six parsecs away, Hux. Six parsecs!_  

 **_We are not going back to him._**  

 _We won’t make it out of the system before he arrives._  

 _You don’t know that. Get the_ **_hell_ ** _over here and help me with this engine casing._ **_Now._**  

 _I do know,_ Ren says. But he moves to the engine casing, lifting it out of the grass and rotating it into alignment with a gesture. The WED rolls up with the necessary fittings. Hux’s mind is racing as fast as it ever has in any battle or high-pressure simulation. 

 _We can still escape. I know the Resurgent class. I know exactly where the dead zones in the tractor beam ranges are. We’ll just have to dodge the guns until we can engage the hyperdrive, and I know all the possible firing patterns-_  

Ren’s mind leans on him, just slightly, just enough to send a shock of current through their raw, open circuits. 

 _I am only beginning to understand Grandfather’s wisdom. My master’s knowledge will be invaluable._  

 **_Ren!_ ** Hux feels desperation hot at the corners of his eyes. _For the sake of every star in this_ **_fucking_ ** _galaxy, will you_ **_please_ ** _listen to me._ **_Snoke is going to kill us both._**  

 _He won’t. He’s proud of my accomplishments. We just have to show him._  

 _He’s_ **_manipulating_ ** _you._  

 _We are bound by the Force. We cannot be separated._  

Hux starts warming up the engine the second its casing is safely secured. Ren barely glances around the camp he’s made under the shuttle and moves to board without taking a single thing. 

 **_You’ll need food and water. I have nothing left on board._**  

 _I won’t. He’s here._  

The _Instituter_ drops out of hyperspace as Hux retracts the ramp. Hux’s long range scanners are damaged, but the sheer size of a Resurgent-class Star Destroyer makes the static irrelevant. Snoke’s presence seems to dim the light of the gas giant, a volcanic cloud blotting out the stars. His attention rains down around them, malevolent and invasive. 

Ren strides into the common room and moves to the transparisteel tube. He looks at Hux’s broken body and feels unbearable love and unbearable pain, each the seed of the other. 

Hux wants to strangle him. Their only chance is to hate each other the way they’re supposed to. He hates Ren so much at the moment it makes him feel scooped out and hollow. He wants to howl. He wants to reach up with that fist of lighting and tear a hole in the _Instituter_ just like they tore up a mountain by the roots. 

 _It’s going to be all right, Hux. Grandfather sent me a vision._  

 _Was I a shuttle in that vision, Ren?_  

 _No._  

 _Then it was_ **_wrong._**  

 ** _Hux._** Ren says, with unacceptable calm and gentleness. And then Hux’s brain is shorting and he’s plunging. He’s right back where he started this whole mess: dangling in a dark well, dragged down by the weight of his boots and the agony of a death blow, drowning. 

 

_\- - - -_

 

Hux holds his breath. Rain drums hard on the surface of the water; Hux can’t tell it from the beat of his own blood. He holds his breath and his chest clenches and aches. Rage paralyzes him, it devours him in his helplessness. Ren has infected him with this anger. He has no choice but to contain it. 

He fought the entire flight up out of the atmosphere. He fought and Ren held him under effortlessly. 

Hux floats, hanging in the grey-green twilight, and he holds his breath, waiting. He wonders if he’ll be able to tell when he dies. He doubts it’s happened yet. The slash across his torso still burns him. His temples throb. The hole in his chest constricts until the crystalline shard lodged there prickles with piezoelectric charge. 

In the bottom of that hole he can see Ren, kneeling at Snoke’s feet. 

They are speaking, but not aloud. Their lips don’t move. He can see Snoke’s hands, gnarled and fragile against the arms of his throne. He can see Snoke’s mouth pinched with disapproval. The soot cloud of Snoke’s power wreaths Ren’s body, trying to force its way inside him. To steal him and steal from him. 

The hole in Hux’s chest is a well within a well, glass-clear, crystal-clear. It shows him the tension in Ren’s shoulders, the icy calm in his eyes as he raises them to his master. 

The black and white blade ignites in his hand. Snoke recoils, ash flying thick, snapping with commands like lightning strikes. But Kylo Ren is insulated and grounded. He is strong as transparisteel, clear as the water under the lily pads.  
He floats to his feet, face scarred and serene. He swings the saber down and Snoke’s clawing fingers cannot touch him.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this ends part 1 of this series. Thank you SO much to everyone who read, kudosed and commented. I apologize again for not replying to comments in a timely fashion. I'm socially awkward. But I do read and treasure all of them. 
> 
> There will be a bit of a hiatus while I draft part 2. I like to have most of a story roughed out before I start posting any of it. I'm a slow writer so it will likely be a couple of months. 
> 
> In the mean time, if you SIMPLY CANNOT wait, there is a [very early draft of the opening of part 2](http://universe-c.tumblr.com/post/142823510579/the-one-where-hux-is-a-ship) available over on [my tumblr. ](http://universe-c.tumblr.com/) You can follow me there for fic updates and teasers plus various reblogs and AU shitposts. 
> 
> Thank you all again for your support for this fic. It's been a couple years since I managed to turn out a story and it's really gratifying that people enjoyed it!


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